


Colder On Your Own

by perfectpro



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Invasion of Privacy, Misogyny, Pre-Canon, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 15:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11831583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: Jack is going to be the first woman in the NHL and God help anyone who tries to get in her way.





	Colder On Your Own

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of a two-part series where the only thing that's different is SMH is SWH. All other characters will remain unaffected.
> 
> Title from Ricky Montogmery's "This December"
> 
> If you want more information about the "invasion of privacy" tag, please see the end notes.

When Jack is a baby, her dad sets her down in the Stanley Cup and she’s pictured in one of the more memorable photographs of the Cup. She obviously doesn’t remember anything about it, but in the photo she’s fully seated in the Cup with her parents supporting her head and both of them making the same horrified expression as she relieves herself in hockey’s greatest trophy.

There probably wasn’t a question of whether to hold her above the Cup or set her in it. No one brought up the superstition that you shouldn’t touch the Cup if you want to win it later in life. In the videos they have from that day, her dad picked her up and spun her around and set her inside while she fussed at all the noise, not even pausing to think about it, because of course the fact that there was even a decision to make in the first place wouldn’t have occurred to him.

Jack looks at that photo, that photo that has been featured in every documentary about the Cup’s travels since it’s been taken, and she feels like maybe she’s always been cursed.

-x-

She doesn’t remember how old she is when a boy slams into her and says that she shouldn’t be playing with the boys. She doesn’t remember there being a first time, like maybe it happened before she could remember, like maybe she’s gotten used to never being taken seriously.

She does remember her parents talking about whether to put her on a girl’s hockey team or a co-ed team once she’s old enough, once checking is introduced in the first place. Her dad calls her over after dinner once everything’s been put away, and he lifts her up into his lap to ask the question, making sure that she understands that it’s serious.

“It’s going to be rough, Jack, and you could get hurt if you play with the boys,” he explains as her mother watches them from across the table. “There will be a few girls on the team if you play with the boys, or you can go to a girls’ team. What do you want to do?”

Jack doesn’t have to think about it for long, and the only question she can come up with is, “Why wouldn’t I play with the boys?”

He beams at her, ruffling her hair as he announces, “That’s my girl."

-x-

The co-ed team fits her style of hockey better, Jack knows. It’s what her dad tells her mother after particularly rough games, when Jack gets home and grabs bags of frozen peas to ice put on her sides. She’s a more physical player, and the game is faster, and it’s an all-around better fit for her.

Every time that Alicia says that maybe she should be playing with girls, Bob is always quick to protest. “She is playing with girls. It’s a co-ed team, there are other girls with her.”

He’s right, and Jack loves playing with Brigitte, Amelie, and Nicole. All of them have older brothers who play hockey, are used to the checking aspect of the game, and they sometimes have sleepovers and watch movies of high school girls with boyfriends after Amelie’s mother has checked to make sure they’re in their sleeping bags before going off to bed herself.

“I can’t wait to have a boyfriend,” Nicole whispers, watching Heath Ledger dance and evade the high school security guards at the same time.

Amelie hums her immediate ascent, but Brigette shrugs and says, “Boys are so weird. My brother’s friends are all loud and gross. What if they’re all that way?”

“They can’t all be that way,” Nicole protests, but they stop to think about it for a second.

“All the guys on our team are that way,” Jack points out, because they are. When they went out for pizza after their last game, the guys had dared each other to build the grossest pizza that they could and then eat a slice. “Remember how Andre ate the anchovy head-first?”

They all shudder, Brigitte scrunching her up nose at the memory. “At least he didn’t eat a whole slice like Jean-Paul.” She sticks her tongue out and scrunches her nose, because Jean-Paul hadn’t even looked bothered as he’d bitten into the slice of pizza smothered in jalapeños, anchovies, capers, and pineapple.

“Didn’t you eat some of it, too, Brigitte?” Amelie asks, and Jack remembers that, too, the way that Brigitte had pinched her nose as she took her bite and swallowed.

“It was a bet, that doesn’t count. You guys can’t count that!” Brigitte shouts, laughing as Nicole pauses the movie and glares at them all to get quiet again before pressing play.

“Girls!” Amelie’s mother calls sternly, and they all hush quickly before giggling as quietly as they can.

-x-

Nicole and Amelie don’t play much longer than a season or two with them, but Brigitte and Jack stick together, even when they’re the only ones in the girl’s locker room and they can hear the guys shouting from down the hall. Brigitte is a defense-woman so it’s not like they play on the same line or anything, but it’s good to have another girl on the ice with her.

It’s good until her dad is saying that she’s better than the co-ed team, that she can play on a boys’ team and her game would get better while her mother sits to the side, knowing that she shouldn’t even bother to get involved when hockey is what’s at stake.

So Jack changes in a locker room by herself and gets on the ice with all boys, all boys who haven’t played hockey with girls since pee-wee. They stare at her, and Jack feels like an animal at the zoo when the coach introduces her to the team.

Practice is strange, without the guys that she’s grown used to over the years, the guys who never cared that she was on the ice because they knew what they’d signed up for when they went co-ed. Brigitte isn’t there, either, but she taught Jack a few weeks before how to put on eyeliner and had whispered, “boys are dumb, use whatever you can as a weapon” as she applied it. So Jack had tried to put some on before practice, but she hadn’t done as good of a job as Brigitte and her mom had noticed before they’d left the house.

“What are you wearing?” Alicia had asked, an inscrutable look on her face as she’d inspected the job Jack had done, the crooked black smudges that went around the eye instead of outlining it.

“Eyeliner,” Jack had mumbled, feeling herself blush as she held her equipment bag higher. “I know I didn’t do it right.”

Alicia paused, grabbing a makeup wipe from her bag and holding it out before pausing. “Do you want me to fix it?” she asked hesitantly, waiting for Jack to nod and then reaching out and removing it gently. “Here, sit down,” she instructs, motioning to a chair at the kitchen table.

As her mom redoes the eyeliner, Jack sits very still and thinks about all the times that her mother has had this done, the countless runways that she walked on and scenes that she did after having a makeup artist powder her face. It feels strange, not as forceful when Brigitte did it, and her mom caps the eyeliner pencil after doing a quick touch up.

“There we are. You look beautiful,” Alicia announces, smiling while she tucks the pencil back into the small makeup bag she keeps in her purse. 

Jack flushes, because she knows that she’s not. She’s thirteen, overweight and weird-looking with features that people call “striking” because it’s the most polite alternative to saying that she’s very strange looking, very ugly. Eyeliner isn’t going to fix that. “Thanks, Maman,” she says, hopping off the stool and turning away before her Alicia can see that she’s embarrassed as she says the words.

“Alright, let’s head out. You don’t want to be late on your first day,” Alicia says, using the faux-chipper voice that she acquires whenever they talk about Jack playing with only the boys.

-x-

The guys on her team aren’t so bad once they get used to her and after their coach has reminded them to pass to her the message seems to get across. They’re more standoffish than her old team was, sure, but Jack knew to expect that. Half of them actively try not to check her, and the other half slam into her, and she doesn’t complain because she has something to prove.

That’s just the way that it is for girls who break into hockey leagues the way that she does.

Jack learned early on that she couldn’t be hysterical and be taken seriously at the same time. One of the last practices that Nicole went to on their old team, she broke down crying after something that one of the boys had said to her. Jack doesn’t remember what was said or whether it deserved that kind of reaction, but Nicole burst into tears and then all the guys called her a cry baby after that.

Nicole stopped showing up to practice, and when Jack asked her parents what happened the only answer she got was her father shaking his head and remarking, “It’s a real shame.”

So Jack doesn’t cry in front of guys, especially not in front of teammates. She generally tries not to cry period, but that’s not always possible with puberty happening and her body becoming a raging mass of hormones.

Puberty changes things for hockey, because there’s no way it can’t. Where Jack used to carry love handles are now smooth expanses of skin, and her chubby legs now flex whenever she moves them in the slightest of ways. It’s nice at first, the kind of body that she used to stare at in those old movies with Amelie and Nicole and Brigitte and wonder if she’d ever be that pretty.

This body doesn’t get paparazzi photos at the beach asking if Alicia Zimmermann has been missing a whale, but it does get photos of it taken in a bikini when she’s on vacation with Brigitte that summer, and the words on the page about her transformation make her feel slimy and disgusting.

She has an ass, now, larger than she’s comfortable with in all honesty, but there’s small mercy to be found in her mostly flat chest. Stretch marks litter her thighs, but in some ways it’s better than the cellulite that used to be there. At least now no one looks surprised when she says she plays sports, as least people aren’t joking now when they ask if she works out. Fourteen is an awkward age for anyone, but especially a girl who’s gotten her growth spurt and had her stomach fat move to all the right places.

When she comes back for hockey after that summer, suddenly none of the guys can look her in the eyes. They stare at her chest, even if they’re all in pads and there’s not much to look at anyway, or else they look behind her, eyes trained right above her head so that no one can call them on it.

She overhears one of the guys saying to his friend as they head to the locker room, “It was always weird playing with a girl, but at least last year she was ugly enough that I could pretend she was a guy, you know?”

She doesn’t bother to listen if the other guy agrees, just grabs her water bottle and gets off the ice as fast as possible, tears stinging at her eyelids.

-x-

It’s not that the teams they play against have ever been nice to her, but they didn’t used to be this rough. She’s actively targeted now, and maybe it’s because what that guy said is true, maybe now they can’t ignore the fact that there’s a girl playing with them.

They all hate her, or it feels like that even if she knows it’s not true. Most of the guys on her team get used to it after they’ve been back for about a month, and the only real change is that Jack triple checks the lock on the door to the girl’s locker room before she changes after she hears a few of them joking to sneak back and watch her.

But the other teams? A few bags of frozen peas occasionally turns into after every game, turns into fights on the ice that Jack skates away from as quickly as possible, turns into guys staring at her across the face-off dot and saying they’d like to see her on her knees or her mouth would look even better stretched around their cock.

She blocks it out and she plays, she plays harder than she’s ever played before. She’s playing better than she’s ever played before, too, and she’s not just competing with the boys anymore. She’s winning.

It doesn’t occur to her that one day it will have to stop until Brigitte calls and talks about college.

It’s early days, but Brigitte has always been a planner, and she hasn’t changed since Jack has met her. She has statistics and numbers to back her up, and she talks about colleges in America and NCAA championships and her voice gets quiet when she talks about picking a major.

Brigitte is trying to plan for life after high school, trying to figure out how to extend her hockey career as far as possible. For the first time, it occurs to Jack that her hockey career has an expiration date.

Even if she keeps playing, even if she keeps playing well, even if she plays better than she’s ever played before, she’s never going to make it to the NHL.

-x-

“You’re not serious about this,” Alicia says in disbelief, and it might be a question or it might not be. If it is, Jack doesn’t know the right answer.

“Of course she’s serious about this!” Bob shouts, excitement leaping into his voice as he pulls Jack into a hug. “I’ll find out who I need to call. We’re going to get on this, Jack; you’re going to do great,” he says, already making for the kitchen and grabbing his cell phone as he goes.

When he’s gone, Jack pauses and looks back at her mother, who is staring at her in a way that can only be described as forlorn. “Juniors, Jack?” Alicia asks, knowing the answer but still hoping for something different.

If it wasn’t Juniors, Jack doesn’t know what it would be. She’d finish up high school and then play in college and then what? Maybe if she keeps up her training she could break onto the 2014 Olympic roster, but what then? She has to find some way to play hockey, because the current route isn’t really possible.

There isn’t a league in the country that pays women, and Jack is very fortunate in that she could play for her entire life and her parents would be able to support her, but that’s not what she wants. It feels wrong to think about being able to do something like that, and it feels just as wrong to think about doing something other than hockey for the rest of her life. Hockey isn’t a hobby or just some extracurricular. It’s what she does, it’s who she is.

“I need to start in Juniors,” Jack asserts, because that’s the plan.

In some ways, Jack feels bad, because she and her mother have never been close in the way that she and her father are. Hockey is so easy to bond over, and Jack comes home with bruises and Bob will shout out the best way to treat them, grinning all the while. When she came home after getting into her first fight on the ice, holding a cold compress to the black eye that was starting to appear, he’d ruffled her hair and commented, “That’s my girl.”

Alicia has always watched from something akin to the sidelines, an observer who is keenly interested but doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge they’ve gathered. From what Jack knows of her mother’s childhood, it was spent learning to apply makeup with her sisters or being a catalog model who made it big time.

People are never surprised that professional athletes end up with models, but that’s only because they haven’t grown up with them. Jack watches her parents eat dinner, her mother picking delicately through a salad to eat around the croutons, and her father devouring whatever he’s put together, only giving regard to the grams of protein in the thing. They are very different people, and Jack has somehow fallen in with her father while her mother watches them, curious, unsure of what she’s witnessing.

There’s an interview of Alicia out there from after the first movie she’d done after Jack was born, and the interviewer asked if Alicia and Bob had any plans for Jack to learn how to memorize lines yet. Alicia had laughed and stretched her arms up carelessly, baby weight gone thanks to her personal trainer, and said, “I just want Jacquelyn to be a normal girl.”

Jack can’t say with certainty that she’s not what her mother would have wished for, but she’s pretty sure that a 5’11” daughter who wears her bruises as accessories isn’t what Alicia was picturing when she was dreaming of a future for the baby girl that she dressed in pink.

The door crashes open, because Jack doesn’t think her father has ever realized that he doesn’t need to behave like a professional hockey player in the house, and Bob says, “We’re going to hire a personal trainer to come by the house at least once a week, probably twice. I have a few more people I’ll need to talk to on Monday, but you won’t be the first and that helps us a lot. We’re going to do this.”

She won’t be the first in this. It’s mildly reassuring to hear and it helps her calm down a little, that this is more attainable than she’d previously thought. It will still be hard, there’s going to be so much pressure on her, but that’s nothing compared to the other goals she has set for herself.

Bob is still talking, mostly to himself now, about the kind of regimen that she’ll need to be on and the nutrition plan they’ll need to start. She coughs to interrupt him and then announces in a voice that is more unsteady than she’d hoped for, “I want to play in the NHL. “ She winces when the words leave her mouth.

There’s a pocket of silence that expands slowly in the living room. Jack sits with her eyes closed, unwilling to open them and see pity on her parent’s faces. No one speaks, though, and eventually she cracks her eyes open to see her father staring at her, the hint of a smile growing on his face.

“Let’s see what we can do, then,” he tells her, and she jumps out of her seat to throw her arms around him.

-x-

The NHL is a dream that feels almost untouchable, but Jack knows that she can get there. It’s going to be the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life, but she’ll be able to get there.

So she throws herself into her workouts and takes ice baths and lifts more than she’s ever done before. She can’t just be good enough in Juniors, she can’t be average. She’s going to have to be better than all of them, so much better than no scout can deny it, that she’ll be worth the risk for a team to draft a girl on the roster. She’s going to have to be the best.

It keeps her up at night, thinking about just how good she’s going to have to be, and she can’t just turn her brain off at night so that she can go to sleep. It gets bad enough to the point where her mother drives her to a psychiatrist and announces that they’re not leaving until someone figures out what’s wrong.

Jack walks out of the office with a prescript for anti-anxiety medication, and she bites her nails on the car ride over to the pharmacy.

“Maybe this will help,” Alicia says, trying to sound upbeat about it.

It’s possible. Jack shrugs and unbuckles her seatbelt, climbs out of the car and sets out to get it filled. She feels nauseated at the thought that she needs it, because anxiety is the kind of label that teams can use as a reason not to take her, that reporters will mention and people will then nod in understanding. It’s better for her, they’ll say, that she doesn’t stay in that kind of environment, and they’ll all go on believing themselves to be champions of mental health instead of idiotic chauvinistic assholes.

The pharmacist hands her a bottle full of the medication and she doesn’t bother to thank him before turning on her heel and heading back to the car.

-x-

Jack knew what to expect with Juniors. Her trainer put her through the workouts that would be incorporated in those practices for the whole summer. She’s played with boys before, and these boys are just older. Maybe better, but so is she. Once they find out that she’s going to Rimouski, her mother arranges the billet, with one of her teammates who has a younger sister in middle school and an older sister who graduated last year.

She gets there, and the Livingstons are nice enough for her billet parents, and David, the son of her billet parents, talks with her about how long she’s played hockey and the different teams they’ve played on. He played in co-ed for a few years before switching to a boys’ team that was more competitive.

The thing that Jack didn’t expect about Juniors, as it turns out, is Kent Parson.

Kent Parson trips while coming down from the stairs the first time that they meet. Jack helps him up and then asks if he knows where the girl’s locker room is, because David would know but she lost him to some guys who she guesses are their teammates when they first came in.

“Um, I think it’s that way, but we’re about to have hockey practice. You can stay and watch,” he invites her, smiling, still holding her hand from when she helped him up.

Jack drops the smile from her face and pulls her hand forcefully away from his. “I have to stay for practice,” she says, feeling her eye twitch, “because I’m on the team.” She marches off in the direction that he pointed, hoping desperately that he’s right and she doesn’t have to come back out and embarrass herself.

On the ice, after introductions have been made and the team has finally seen the freak show of a girl that they’ll be playing with, the guy skates up her apologetically. “Sorry about, uh, what I said back there,” he says, and he does look it but Jack isn’t inclined to be nice right now.

She’s expecting for him to tack on something insulting to take the blame off himself and possibly make him look better. “I wasn’t expecting the girl on our team to look like you,” maybe, or whatever else he’d come up with. He doesn’t try to dodge the blame, though, and there’s something about it that she appreciates. She nods and shrugs, looking up from the ice to find that he’s still in front of her, waiting for a response.

Their coach is shouting out line combinations, so Jack doesn’t bother to say anything. She doesn’t know what he wants to hear, anyway. She listens out for her name, catching when the coach bellows out, “Parson, Zimmermann!”

She’s halfway to looking around the ice to find her partner when the guy nudges her skate with his. “Parson’s my last name,” he says, looking over her shoulder to see where the other partners are lining up.

“Cool,” Jack answers noncommittally, skating alongside him to their mark as the coach yells out the rest of the combinations.

-x-

It would make Jack’s life so much easier if Kent Parson was easy to hate. If he was rude or misogynistic or a shitty hockey player, she wouldn’t have a problem with dealing with him. She’s dealt with so many guys on teams that are any combination of those three traits, and it’s annoying but she’s gotten used to it.

Instead, Kent Parson is considerate and kind and doesn’t make a big deal that there’s a girl centering his line when he’s a perfectly capable center himself. His playing ability is the worst thing about it, Jack decides.

She’s played with plenty of guys before and she’s always played well, but she always felt like her typical wingers were simply working with her, not making her play any better or worse. Kent doesn’t operate that way, can’t just be someone whose movements she tracks in her mind as functional instead of superb. There’s nothing about him that fades into the background, and that’s part of what makes her life so difficult.

There’s no way to ignore him. Not on the ice, where his performance is attached to hers and they’re lighting it up in ways that Jack didn’t even know hockey could feel like. Not at school, where they have some of the same classes and Kent waits at her locker so they can walk together.

Jack debates asking someone what to do about all of this. Her dad has always been her go to when it comes to teammate interactions, but she and Kent interact fine on the ice. More than fine, really, because they’ve developed the Parson-Zimmermann No Look One Timer that the entire team chirps them about for having eyes in the backs of their heads. She’s not going to call her dad and complain about having spectacular on-ice chemistry with one of her wingers.

There’s always the option of calling her mother, who is more than used to the idea of unwanted attention and would probably know how to make it go away. Only Jack doesn’t know if the attention is unwanted, exactly, just maybe something she’s not accustomed to?

Brigitte is her final choice, and Jack gives her a call that night when she knows Brigitte is out of practice but hasn’t gotten in bed yet. They start off talking about their teams, because Jack feels like Oceanic has a decent kind of chance and Brigitte wants to moan about their goalie that got concussed last practice.

“Practice, Jack, not even a game!” Brigitte exclaims, her exasperation reading over the line perfectly. Jack curls up on her bed in the Livingston’s guest bedroom that they’ve given her use of and smiles, because Brigitte is definitely the person she’s missed the most since moving from Montreal.

She twists and tucks her feet more securely under the blankets. “Sorry about that,” she acknowledges, because that really does suck. “How bad do they think it is?" 

Huffing, Brigitte explains what they’ve told the team and then sighs. “How are your new teammates?” she asks, voice kept carefully neutral.

It’s the perfect opening, so Jack forces herself to take it. “One of the guys is so weird. He’s nice, but he’s just weird,” she says, thinking of how Kent waits for her in the lobby for her to get out of the locker room and walk to their cars together.

“Regular weird, like weird about you being a girl? Or is it more than that?” Brigitte asks.

As bad as it sounds, that’s the problem. “He’s not weird about me being a girl,” Jack answers, thinking about how much easier that would make it. She tells Brigitte about their first meeting and Kent’s subsequent apology, how he hadn’t made excuses for himself. “He keeps hanging around me and stuff. Like, he waits at my locker so we can talk to pre-calculus together and he hangs around the girl’s locker room but not like he’s trying to catch me without my clothes on. I just don’t get it,” she complains, flopping onto her back and groaning. 

There’s a beat and then Brigitte bursts into laughter. “Jackie,” she teases playfully even though she knows that Jack hates being called that, “there are two options here, you beautiful, socially-inept, hockey robot. The first is disappointing to me but you’ll probably like it best, and that everything could mean that he just wants to be your friend. Like, he wants to be your friend off the ice, too.”

Jack freezes and thinks about it, because that isn’t bad. And all of those things are things friends do for each other, but Jack has mostly been on a teammates-only kind of basis with all the guys she’s played with. “What’s the other option?” she asks, but there’s a sinking feeling inside of her when she realizes what it must be.

“That he wants to be more than friends,” Brigitte announces, and she’s probably smiling wide because this is the first time that Jack has ever come to her for boy-related problems before. “Parson has a crush on you,” she sing-songs.

That’s mostly ridiculous. Jack goes to say something, make a retort that would show Brigitte just how unlikely that would be, but she pauses and listens to what sounds like Brigitte’s keyboard. “What are you doing?” she asks with a sigh.

“Looking up this guy. Oh my gosh, Jack, he’s cute. And American, what a scandal. Do your parents know that you have a foreigner after you?” Brigitte giggles, and Jack can feel herself blush.

It’s not like she’s ever thought about the implications of it before, but Kent is cute. The distracting kind of cute, even, where she zones out during math class and always looks in his direction when she does. It doesn’t mean anything, though, just because he’s cute and blonde and so nice that she doesn’t know how to deal with it. It’s just a distraction, that’s all, and Jack can’t afford any distractions if she’s going to play in the NHL.

-x-

The idea of it won’t leave her alone now that Brigitte’s brought it up. Kent isn’t acting any differently than he does normally, but he walks next to her and Jack can’t stop thinking about how easy it would be to just take his hand the next time it brushes hers. When he passes her notes in class, she imagines opening to read something that would have been more likely in elementary school, two check boxes with the note reading, Do you like me? Check yes or no.

Everything is normal as far as hockey is concerned. They’re playing better than anyone expected, and the guys stop being weird about the fact that there’s a girl with them on the ice once she proves that she’s better than most of them.

She’s leaving practice one day when she sees Kent standing in the lobby and she thinks about how easy it would be to walk up and kiss him. She thinks she’d like to, which is maybe the most terrifying thing she’s ever thought before so she tries to shrug it off by knocking her shoulder against Kent’s so he’ll look up from his phone.

Bad decision, because his eyes are hazel today, warm tawny brown with a mossy green intermixed and Jack’s stomach flips when she looks into them. 

Hefting her bag onto her shoulder, she deliberately looks away from him and down the hall. “Good job with the shoot-out practice today. I thought Wilts was going to come out of goal and run down after that third shot.”

Kent’s lips twitch into a smile at the memory. “It’s okay, he dumped itching powder in my socks,” he discloses, and Jack looks down to find that Kent has traded his typical trainers for flip flops that she’d guess were intended to only be used in the shower.

“It’s November,” she says in disbelief, because there’s no way he isn’t going to be cold when they get out to the parking deck.

He shrugs and starts down the hallway, glancing back to make sure that she’s coming with him. “Hazards of messing with the goalie.”

Jack nods more out of lack of anything else to say than agreement. The guys always prank each other in the locker room, leaving itching powder in clothes or taking someone’s clothes when they come out of the shower. She knows about it, of course, because it’s hard to miss the guys pushing each other around on the ice as one of them swears vengeance with a smile that bellies his true intentions.

She’s never really gotten to do that stuff. By virtue of being the only girl in the girl’s locker room, Jack’s after practice experiences are fairly straightforward: shower, get into a change of clothes, and dry her hair. She and Brigitte used to braid each other’s hair before games and gossip between the shower stalls afterwards, and she misses that, but it’s not like she’ll ever get it back.

Kent’s keys jingle as he lifts them out of his bag, drawing Jack back to the present as he grabs her own automatically.

“Bye, Parse,” she says, one arm plunged into her bags as she stretches her fingers to touch the metal of her car keys. She glances at him as he stands by the door, hand frozen on the handle as he looks back at her. Jack reasons to herself that he’s probably just bracing himself before going out and what’s only slightly better than bare feet, but there’s the tiniest bit of intrigue that he’s trying to work up the courage for something else.

Running a hand through his hair, Kent offers up a smirk that’s really more of a lopsided smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then?” he says finally, and something in Jack feels victorious and bashful as she nods.

The thought of what he was really trying to say to her spins around in her mind the whole drive home.

-x-

There’s a party after their game that Friday, something held by their captain’s girlfriend. Jack hadn’t been planning on going, because it’s almost tradition for her at this point to drive to the corner store outside of the rink and buy a bear claw and then eat it on the ride back to her billet home before calling Brigitte and crawling into bed. She knows that some of the guys get together and go out for pizza or something, but Jack’s never gone with them before.

They win, 6-3, and Jack wound up with a goal and two assists so she’s feeling good as she blow dries her hair out, getting the ends carefully the way that her mom showed her. She touches up her eyeliner and throws everything into her extra bag, the bag that the guys won’t even let their eyes linger on after she said she just carried it for ‘girl stuff’.

She has tampons in there, sure, but they’re not likely to come out and bite someone, so she really doesn’t get the big deal.

Getting showered, changed, and drying her hair takes about as long for her to get through as for the guys to shower and change since they spend most of the time just goofing off, so she runs into some of them between the locker rooms. “Nice game, boys,” she throws over her shoulder, giving them a wave and laughing as they make finger guns back at her.

“Wait, is she not?” someone asks, and then there’s a hand at Jack’s shoulder and Kent Parson grinning at her, smile wide enough to be fitting of the two goals that he got in the third period to widen their lead. “Zimms, aren’t you coming to the party tonight?” he asks.

His eyes are green today, piercing under the florescent lighting, and Jack feels herself blush when she looks at him. It isn’t noticeable, she’s sure, as she’s already flushed from the game and then from her steaming shower after. “I wasn’t really planning on it, no,” she says, reaching down and messing with the zipper of her jacket for something to do.

“You should come, it’s going to be a blast. Blaze’s girlfriend is hilarious, you’ll love her,” he proclaims, turning back to nod at their other teammates. “Shouldn’t Zimms come join us?” he asks, reaching over and moving to take her bag of hockey gear even as she twists it out of his reach.

To Jack’s surprise, they all nod and wave for her to join them. “You never do anything with the team, Zimmermann, come on. David says you’re not anti-social, so let’s see it in action,” Wilts calls, and then adds on, “I’ve got an extra seat in my car if you need a ride there.”

Jack blinks, holding her hockey bag tighter as Kent tries to grab it again. “I drove here,” she says slowly, because that’s true whether she’s going to the party or not. So she doesn’t need a ride.

Wilts grins and shakes his head, elbowing Gordo when he snickers. “I mean, I think Blaze is the only one who’s going straight there. The rest of us go home for a little bit before we head out. I’m picking up David tonight, so I can grab you no problem.”

She takes a moment to pause and then Kent places an arm around her shoulders and she actually freezes as they all wait for her answer. People don’t just touch Jack, especially not her teammates who seem to think they might catch something if they touched her without pads on. Kent touches her, though, moving hair out of her face as they sit in class and not minding when their hands occasionally brush when they walk together.

“I’ll go,” she says abruptly, because now she’s sure.

-x-

She buys her honeybun on the way home and tosses the wrapper in the trash when she gets back to her billet home, licking the sugar off of her fingers and giving Mrs. Livingston a half-wave as she makes her way back to her room.

Wilts said he’d be by in an hour, which means that Jack has some time to kill, so she calls up Brigitte for their traditional after-game talk, reviewing the points that she was weakest on. “I need to be better about splitting the D,” she comments, because her game was good but it could have been better. It needs to be better for her to be NHL material.

“Please, I’m looking at your stats right now. You realize that a three-point night isn’t bad, right?” Brigitte asks, openly laughing at her.

Jack wrinkles her nose and flops down on her bed. “Not as good as a four-point night,” she counters.

“Whatever. You need to do something besides hockey at some point soon.”

Rolling her eyes, Jack lays down on her bed and thinks about the guys inviting her out tonight. “I do stuff other than hockey. I’m going to a party tonight, so there.”

She realizes her mistake as soon as she hears Brigitte gasp. “A party? Jack, tell me everything,” Brigitte demands, and Jack pictures her reclining on her own bed, balancing the phone on her shoulder as she paints her toenails with the blue that perfectly matches their old jerseys.

“It’s not a big deal. The captain’s girlfriend is throwing it or something, so I’m going with David and a couple of the guys,” Jack says, hoping that Brigitte doesn’t ask the question that she undoubtedly will.

“Is Kent going?” Brigitte asks, and Jack doesn’t need to see her face to know the kind of grin that’s sprouted.

Denying the urge to shove her face into her pillow, Jack blinks and admits that he is and then holds the phone away from her ear so that Brigitte’s shouting dies down. When the starts listening again, Brigitte is now going on about outfit choices.

“…I know you still have that top I got you for your birthday, but maybe that’s too fancy. Plus, someone’s going to spill something, so you probably don’t want anything to get on that. Maybe that black dress with the straps. What do you think?” Brigitte asks, huffing out a breath when Jack doesn’t respond. “Get out your laptop, this calls for a webcam.”

Jack glances down at what she’s wearing now, her comfiest jeans and a worn Habs sweatshirt. Probably not party material, she agrees and grabs her laptop from the desk to set up a Skype call. “I’m not wearing a dress and I’m not getting fancy,” she prefaces the conversation and Brigitte sighs but nods in defeat. 

“Probably for the best if it’s a house party. Take out your good jeans, though, one of the pairs you got tailored to fit your ass,” Brigitte informs her, reaching beyond her monitor to pull forward a bottle of nail polish. It’s a brilliant red instead of blue that Jack had suspected.

Jack dutifully pulls out a few pairs of jeans from her dresser, holding out two pairs for further inspection. “I have a light wash and a dark wash pair.”

“Dark wash, if anything spills on it it’ll help conceal it,” Brigitte informs her, glancing up to find Jack raising an eyebrow at her. “Oh, come on, Jackie, I’ve done this before. Remember, I told you all about the fact that I played beer pong last month. I didn’t realize it was a real thing. Okay, anyways, dark jeans.”

From there, Jack manages to bargain her way into wearing a flannel, which Brigitte only agrees with if she pairs it with her brown boots.

“I totally forgot that you like to masquerade as a lumberjack in your spare time,” Brigitte comments, grinning at Jack through the screen. “I’m not going to be able to talk you into anything other than eyeliner, am I?” she asks, already knowing Jack’s answer.

“Nope,” Jack responds cheerfully, tugging her sweatshirt off and buttoning up the flannel after checking to make sure the buttonholes matched up. After sharing a locker room, she and Brigitte don’t have many boundaries, and Brigitte has seen Jack far more naked than just in her bra and underwear.

Checking her nails for smudges, Brigitte trades the brush over to her other hand and they catch up for the rest of the call. Brigitte is just going on about how Andre got into a fight in their latest game when there’s a knock at Jack’s bedroom.

She opens it to find David looking at his phone before tilting the screen towards her as he looks up at her and says, “Wilts is almost here if you still want to come.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jack answers, turning around to her laptop to say goodbye to Brigitte and turn everything off. “I’m still coming.”

-x-

It isn’t that Jack has never had a guy who’s been interested in her before. After the summer where she turned fourteen, it seemed like there was no lack of guys who would come up to her to make lewd comments. The guys at school were friendly where before they hadn’t paid her any attention, and Jack spent the year wishing that she was still overweight and ugly instead of suddenly tall and toned.

The only guys she was close enough to have considered dating them would have been her teammates, guys that she never would have considered dating. And typically, she’d slammed those guys to the board enough to the point where they wouldn’t have been interested in her anyway.

So she’s never had a guy who’s liked her before, at least for more than her looks. Definitely never a boy who she’s liked back before, so it’s entirely new territory when she’s standing by the wall in the living room and she catches Kent literally do a double take out of the corner of her eye.

He wedges himself between people until he’s close enough to reach her, smiling. “Hey, you came.”

Glancing down at herself, she shrugs. “I guess I did,” she agrees, biting back a smile of her own.

Kent looks at her and then says, “You don’t have anything to drink. Do you want something? I know Danny brought some stuff, come on.” He waits for her to nod and turns in the way of what must be the kitchen, one of his hands further back than it would be normally, like he wants to reach for her but doesn’t quite know how.

In a fit of bravery, Jack extends her hand to grab his and lets him lead the way.

It feels like she’s watching one of the movies that she used to watch with Brigitte, Nicole, and Amelie as they reach the kitchen and Kent pours her a drink of his choosing when she says she doesn’t really know what she likes. From the outside, someone could look at them as Jack looks at Kent through lowered lashes from above the rim of her cup and think that they must like each other, that of course something will happen between them.

Someone who might look at them wouldn’t know how hard Jack’s heart is pounding in her chest. Other girls never seem to have this kind of trouble with guys, never seem to stumble over words before they’ve even said anything.

They manage, though, wandering through the party together, squeezing onto the sofa together with their legs right next to each other with some of their teammates surrounding them. They must know what’s going on, judging by the way that Kent gets elbowed a few times and Jack sees a couple of them staring at her with raised eyebrows.

Nothing more happens, though, not until Jack’s getting ready to leave with David and Wilts, grabbing her jacket as Kent stands to the side, biting his lip as he watches her. It feels like now should be the time for it, but Jack doesn’t know what it entails, exactly, and she stays quiet as David argues with Cam over who gets shotgun.

They’ve just about settled the discussion when Kent finally moves forward, touching her hand in a way that seems more tentative than she would have guessed. Kent isn’t tentative, typically, he’s loud and confident and impossible to imagine as different, but now he’s careful beyond compare.

Startled, Jack looks at him and watches as he takes a steadying breath and then asks, “Do you want to go out tomorrow? We could get dinner.”

Heart thumping in her chest, she’s nodding before he’s even finished with the question. “Yeah, that’d be nice,” she says, biting back her smile just a little bit so it doesn’t look deranged or something.

On the ride back, Jack spends the whole time trying not to blush as she thinks about it. David teases her about it, asking how JP, her other winger is supposed to feel now that she’s showing favorites. Wilts and Cam laugh, sounding like they’re going to bother the hell out of Kent for this, but they don’t say much to her about it other than rolling their eyes and saying, “Good luck with Parser. The dude needs all of it he can get.”

-x-

On their first date, they go to dinner and Jack wears her hair natural, because she’d fussed over what style to choose for so long that she didn’t have time to do any of them in the end. They’ve hung out so many times before that it should be easy, but they keep trying to talk at the same time and stop-starting the conversation until Jack finally starts laughing because it’s all so ridiculous.

“We’re making this so much weirder than it has to be. You’re my best friend, and I like you. This is going to be good no matter what,” she says, grinning easily at him as though she’s made the decision for them.

Tension that she hadn’t even realized was there runs out of Kent’s body and he gives a breathless laugh in return, reaching over the table and taking her hand. “Okay then,” he agrees, smile splitting his face. “You’re my best friend and I like you.”

It probably shouldn’t be that easy, but it is, and the rest of the date feels much more normal. It almost feels like what it typically does when they hang out, only Jack keeps finding herself staring at Kent’s lips with the realization that she’ll know what they feel like against hers soon enough. It’s a nice thought, but a little intimidating, because she’s sixteen and never been kissed before so she doesn’t quite know how it works.

Brigitte explained it to her that afternoon, giddy with the story Jack told of Kent shyly touching her hand and asking her out. “Just make sure you don’t hit his nose. And don’t move in too fast, you might knock foreheads. Or your chins. I know I’m making it sound complicated, but it’s pretty easy. You’ll be fine,” Brigitte assured Jack.

It did sound complicated and Jack didn’t exactly have a ton of confidence in herself, but when they’re in Kent’s car after he’s driven her back to the Livingston’s, she doesn’t wait very long after the key is taken out from the ignition and Kent turns to her before she makes her move, trying to remember Brigitte’s words in her head.

Don’t move too fast, don’t hit his nose, don’t knock foreheads, Jack thinks before Kent gets with the program and moves in with her so they meet in the middle. Despite all the things that could go wrong, none of them do, and it’s a good first kiss, their lips dry against each other for a long moment.

Kent moves to deepen the kiss, his tongue dragging on her lips and Jack is about to open them when there’s a rapping noise on her window.

They jump apart, eyes wide as they turn to find David staring at them with a deeply unimpressed expression. Jack moves over to roll her window down, glaring at him. 

“You realize that if you start making out in my parents’ driveway, my mom will totally call your dad about it, right?” he checks in, and Jack notices that Kent has moved further away now, as far away from her as he can get without opening the door and getting out of the car.

“We weren’t making out, fuck off,” Jack hisses, cheeks flaming, because they hadn’t been. “Were you watching for us or something?”

David rolls his eyes at her and then looks at Kent and arches an eyebrow meaningfully, which pisses Jack off because she doesn’t know why he’d blame Kent instead of the both of them when there was clearly an equal amount of kissing going on. “Whatever, do what you want. I’ll be inside,” he tells them finally, walking back inside and leaving the front light on.

Though he’s no longer trying to mold himself into the door, Kent isn’t as close as he had been, and he rubs at the back of his neck as he looks at the spot that David was only just in.

Jack bites her lip and presses her hands in her pockets. Whatever feeling there was between them seems to have disappeared when David knocked on the window. “I, um, had a really nice time tonight,” she says, more than a little relieved when he turns to her and smiles.

“I did too. Maybe next weekend we can do it again?” he asks hopefully.

Going through what she has to do this week, Jack shakes her head. “We have games on Friday and Saturday night.”

Kent pauses and then reconsiders, shrugging. “Let’s go get something after, then,” he says, as though that’s how easy it is.

It can be that easy, Jack realizes, and she grins as she nods in return.

-x-

Hockey is simple, is the only thing in Jack’s life that she’s never questioned. She knows she’s good enough to be where she is, and it’s not her problem if people think that she shouldn’t be. Nothing else has ever been like hockey, has ever made Jack feel calm and confident.

Kent feels like that, and maybe it’s in part because they play so well together that she has so much trust in him already. Whatever it is, Kent fits into her life in a way that feels right, settling in to a point where it’s almost unnoticeable to everyone else with the types of changes they’ve accommodated for each other.

Before she goes home that summer, she and Kent make plans for visiting each other. Even then, it feels like they’re still going to be apart for too long, and Jack looks at the ground and shuffles her feet when she asks her parents if Kent can come visit.

“We’ve, um, been seeing each other,” Jack explains, anxiety building in her stomach as she dares to glances up only to see her father staring back at incredulously.

“How long have you been seeing each other?” Bob asks, voice kept carefully neutral, and Jack tells herself that he doesn’t always look at her through the rearview mirror while driving so it probably doesn’t mean anything now that he’s not. It probably doesn’t mean anything.

It’s clear that it means something, though, when even after he’s agreed and everything has been finalized for Kent to come that her dad still isn’t willing to talk about it anymore. He asks her questions about her training, how the rest of the team is coming together.

They talk about hockey, about how she and Kent are alternate captains for the upcoming seasons. That’s as much as he’ll talk about Kent, though. If Bob shies away from talking about Kent, Alicia seems to push any and all conversations towards it, making Jack talk about her first boyfriend at any opportunity.

That’s what Kent is, her boyfriend, as strange as it sounds at first. The team makes fun of them and how gooey they can get around each other after a win, but they don’t seem to care that much. It’s an easy thing to relax into, how the most shit she gets for it is David reminding her to not let the Livingstons catch them making out.

The summer is strange, even more so than usual. It’s like her parental relations have been flipped, her father interacting with her distantly in between previously planned activities and her mother parading her through groups of friends, insisting on discussing everything that’s happened since Jack left for Juniors. Kent is what Alicia likes to talk about best, though, and Jack likes to talk about Kent anyway so it’s not like it’s a hardship.

Jack knows that this is probably the only thing that they have to talk about, the only connection they really have other than the eyeliner that Jack reserves for game days. Their worlds are so different, because Jack wobbles in high heels but can sprint across a rink in skates without a problem. It’s strange, somewhat, to sit across from her at lunch and actually have things to talk about. Stranger still, the silence that permeates every room that Jack and her father stand in.

-x-

The best thing about being home is Brigitte, who sprints down her driveway when Jack pulls up and is tugging on the car door before Jack has even taken the key out. Brigitte looks like summer, hair blonder and skin tanner from time spent lounging at the pool, and Jack embraces her gladly.

They talk about Brigitte’s season, about what Amelie and Nicole have been up to and make plans to get together with them later on. Brigitte goes through Jack’s wardrobe, rolling her eyes at all of the worn sweatshirts that Jack has collected from her father and his various NHL teams over the years. “Do you really need five pairs of black sweatpants?” she asks, raising her eyebrows judgmentally at Jack’s fashion sense or lack thereof.

“Black goes with everything,” Jack responds, rolling her eyes and propping her chin up with her hands. Brigitte has put some CD on with a pop singer that sounds more like what Kent listens to on the radio than Jack’s own taste, and she pulls out her phone to send him a text.

Brigitte sets aside three of the pairs of sweats, raising her middle finger as Jack protests. “I’m letting you keep two, and you also have that gray pair plus your navy Oceanic ones. You don’t need more than four, if that,” she announces, and then shoots Jack a dirty look when she uncovers the small stockpile of sweatbands that Jack was purposefully trying to keep hidden.

Ducking her head, Jack ignores the curses that Brigitte has started spewing in favor of texting Kent about her upcoming visit, when she’s flying down after Canada Day so that she can be there for his birthday.

-x-

New York feels like Montreal but on a different level, where this time she’s the one with the accent instead of Kent. Kent pulls her through the city and insists on showing off all the sights. Jack meets Kent’s parents, who smile indulgently at her, and his older sister Rachel, who glances at Jack surreptitiously while reading college textbooks.

It’s over too soon, and Kent kisses her goodbye at the airport shyly while Rachel taps at the steering wheel in impatience. “I’ll see you in August,” Jack promises, dipping forward to give him one last kiss before heading out.

Her phone buzzes when she’s in the terminal waiting to board. We should talk about your training when you get back, her dad has sent her and Jack automatically pulls up her regimen to look over it. She worked it out last summer with her dad and the trainer they’d hired to come in every day, and she’s stuck to it for the most part, taking some time off since playoffs have ended. It could be that he wants to update it since it’s been a while, she reasons, but she thinks about it the whole way home.

Her speed doesn’t need much work. She’s fast on the ice, breaking out into a sprint and pushing through. It’s really her strength, because she has trouble splitting the D when she doesn’t have the muscles to effectively check some of the guys off of her. So more strength training would be best, some endurance since she’s a year closer to getting drafted.

When she gets to the airport in Montreal, her dad is in the pickup line and waits for her to get her seatbelt on before they’re heading back to the house and starting in on her training program. “You need to be better about sticking to it,” he says, shooting her a look at they stop at a red light.

“I am sticking to it,” she says, wrinkling her nose and fidgeting.

“I know you haven’t been using the home gym very often since you got back. I don’t know why; you and Brigitte could train together. You wouldn’t be at the same level, but as long as you’re still pushing yourself. You need to be performing better. I called Paul to ask him to come in, he’s going to gauge what you should be doing by now,” Bob announces, sounding like he’s gearing up for an argument.

They never used to argue about hockey. The only kind of arguing about hockey that used to happen in the house was between her parents, with Alicia never pleased that Jack was the only girl on her team. It was a point of contention for her, a point of pride for Bob, who would tell the boys that they could hit like a girl if they worked hard enough.

Jack stares out the window and watches the familiar drive, trying to keep her breathing in check. Her phone buzzes in her pocket, no doubt a text from Kent responding to the one she’d sent that she’d gotten back. “I am doing what I should be doing,” she tells him, not daring to come across as upset.

This statement seems to be what Bob was driving the conversation towards the whole time, and he shakes his head. “You’re training for Juniors, Jack, the same as all the guys on your team. You need to be training for the NHL. Your endurance isn’t anywhere near where it needs to be, and you need more power in your backcheck. Your forecheck could use some work while we’re at it, too, that’s why you’re having trouble splitting the D. If you want to be in the NHL, you’re going to have to work for it.”

She feels like she does after a particularly rough check, when she can tell that the other team isn’t happy to be sharing ice with a girl. She’s used to that, though, almost. She’s not used to her dad telling her that she isn’t working hard enough.

“I am working on it,” she snaps, pressing her fingernails on the upholstery of the seat. It doesn’t matter that he just explained to her the stuff that she mostly already knew that she needed to work on. “And I am training. I took some time off to see friends, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still know.” She’s seething and it’s obvious, and the only reason that she’s holding back is because she’s always holding back. She can’t play as the only girl in the QMJHL and be emotional, so it’s nothing new to bite her tongue and hold her tears in.

-x-

By the time that they get home, Jack grabs her bag and sprints up the stairs before the tears actually start falling, ignoring her mother as Alicia looks up from her magazine to ask how New York was. Bob sighs at the doorway and calls, “Paul is coming by tomorrow afternoon and all you’ll be doing is tests. Make sure you’ve stretched by the time he gets here.”

When Paul does show up the next afternoon, he and Jack spend the doing the types of test that Paul says they do at the combine. They don’t do all of them, but enough to the point where Jack is lying on the floor when they finish, chest heaving as she tries to catch her breath.

“You’re good, Jack,” Paul says, flipping through his clipboard. “These are definitely above anything that someone could hope for. You should be very pleased with yourself.”

Gasping, Jack raises her arms above her head and stands slowly, taking care to steady herself. The question balances on the tip of her tongue, its implications unspoken to anyone except for her parents. Paul has to know, though, because that’s why he’s here. He put her through the kinds of tests they do at the combine, so he has to know that that’s where she’s hoping to end up next year. “Am I NHL good?” she asks, panting.

He doesn’t bother to look at his clipboard before answering simply, “No.”

It takes a moment for it to sink in, and Jack can’t be sure if it’s that she stood up too fast or his answer that’s making her head spin.

Paul doesn’t seem inclined to apologize for his harsh response. “You’re on track to the point where I suspect you would perform well enough at the combine next year. Average performance that, combined with your ice time, should make you fairly marketable if you were anyone else.”

The room isn’t tilted anymore, but Jack still can’t make sense of what he means by the last thing he said. “I’d be marketable if I was anyone else?” she asks, the question coming out more shrilly than intended.

Because no one is going to tell her it isn’t possible. Jack is going to make it to the NHL, everyone else’s opinion be damned. She’s going to play hockey and keep playing hockey and no one is going to stop her. She knows that she’s going to have to put the work in, that she’s going to be exhausted and out of breath and it’s going to be the best thing that she’s ever done.

Shrugging, Paul nods. “If you’re average, you’re not going to get drafted. They’ll have two hundred and ten guys who will be just as good who don’t come with the kind of baggage that drafting a woman would. You can’t be good enough to where you don’t have that baggage for a team to take on; you have to be good enough to make it worth it.” He looks up at her and pauses, seeming to evaluate something about her.

“You need to make me that good,” Jack demands, her heart hammering in her chest. 

He smiles, looking as though it’s the exact thing he was hoping she’d say.

-x-

Jack throws herself into the program, pushing herself harder than she’s ever done before. She’s got to make it to the NHL, she’s got to give everything she has to make it happen.

Brigitte trains with her, doing a modified version of Jack’s own workout and panting on the treadmill as Jack finishes up. “You’re killing me, Jackie,” she announces during her cool-down, breathing heavily as she watches Jack do one-legged squats and try to keep her balance.

Holding her breath until she’s at the top of the movement, Jack lets it out in a controlled slide as she bends her knee again. “Not my fault you haven’t been doing enough,” she answers, muscles screaming in protest as she holds herself low to the ground. It’s more than she’s been doing this past summer, more than she’s gotten used to recently, but she doesn’t do more than wince as she starts the sequence again.

By the time that Kent comes up to visit, she’s been training for a month and her muscles are so used to the ache that she almost doesn’t feel it anymore. Off days are a luxury, something she can only justify if she’s taking the time to go swimming or do a hike. Kent just raises his eyebrows and shakes his head at her when he sees her training schedule pinned up in her room.

“No one else is working this hard, Jack, it’s August,” Kent points out as he lays out on the floor and tosses a baseball above him and reaches up to catch it. Jack sits at her desk, trying to look indifferent as he asks, “You want the Memorial Cup that badly, huh?”

She’s not training for the Memorial Cup. She wants it, yes, but it’s a stepping stone. Just a stepping stone, when it gets down to it.

Swallowing, Jack reaches over for a bottle of nail polish, tilting it to catch the light. “Something like that,” she agrees. She should tell Kent, but it sounds ridiculous, Jack can’t convince herself that it won’t sound that way to anyone other than her and her father. Her trainer was right: She carries baggage, and she has to be good enough to make it worth it for a team to take her on.

She thinks about it all the time now, because every rep is a step closer to where she needs to be. Brigitte keeps talking colleges and now she’s started asking where Jack is looking into, but that’s a backup plan if it’s anything and thinking about it makes her feel the kind of itch under her skin that she can only get rid of by taking some more of her medication. And so maybe she’s not telling Kent everything that she should be, but she doesn’t have to, it’s not like she’s lying to him.

-x-

It’s strange having Kent in Montreal, like she’s trying to wedge him into a space where he doesn’t quite belong. They have fun together, sneaking him into her room at night and making sure he’s back in the guest bedroom in the morning, but it feels like she’s playing show and tell with him for her parents.

Her mother loves Kent immediately, latches on to the idea that Jack has a boyfriend, that Jack can be like other girls in this way, that this is a sign that she isn’t so completely different after all. Her father seems to look through Kent when he looks at him at all, and Jack doesn’t ask if he likes him because the answer is already evident.

Kent can tell how they each feel, so he ends up offering to help Alicia with dinner just to avoid the living room where Jack and Bob are hashing out hockey plays. It’s something that Kent would be otherwise interested in, Jack knows, watching game tape with a legend, ready to dissect his motions.

“Your dad hates me,” he complains near the end of the trip, lying on Jack’s bed as she stretches out beside him.

For a moment, Jack wonders if she should try to sound surprised or even attempt to assure Kent that he’s wrong. The problem is that he’s right, though, that Bob blinks almost in surprise whenever Kent appears, like he can’t believe that he’s still here. “He’s trying,” she claims, because that might actually be true.

Narrowing his eyes at her, Kent shakes his head. “Also, even if he doesn’t know that we’re doing this, he definitely suspects that something’s up. I think he’s going to put a camera in the hall outside your room to catch me coming over.”

Jack wouldn’t put it past her father, but she doesn’t say anything. Mostly, she’s thinking about how she tried to sell Kent to them before his visit, when her stories were all her parents had to go off of.

For her mom: Kent was learning French with Jack’s help, was friendly and popular in school, was interesting and funny and made Jack feel welcome. Kent went to school dances, Kent did his homework, Kent wanted to set up a date night during the season to make sure that they would have time blocked out for each other.

For her Dad: Kent was her co-captain, was always last off the ice with Jack, could move a puck across the ice and split the D like he was born for it. Kent knew where to be when she was setting him up for a goal, Kent followed the nutrition plan, Kent trained the way that he needed to.

Her mom had been an easy sell, Alicia eager to meet the boy who was making her daughter into a real girl, welcoming him into their home with open arms. Bob had been a bit harder, as expected, and he’d finally set down his fork at the dinner table one night and announced to her, “I just don’t like it. That boy is more of a distraction than you need.”

-x-

When the season starts, it gets worse. Her teammates are better this year, and other than a few of the new ones, they don’t have to adjust to having a girl on the ice with them. She’s better, too, bulked up from the summer and charging down the ice like a bat out of hell. They start winning and they keep winning, and Jack knows that this could be the only time that she’ll ever play hockey like this. This could be the last year that she doesn’t play on an all-girls team.

Kent has started to notice, because now he says they don’t have to go out, they can just stay in and relax. He says she looks tired, he says she’s working too hard, and Jack should tell him but she can’t bring herself to. What she wants to do has never been done before, possibly can never be done if she can’t manage to do it.

“I’m worried about you,” Kent confesses one night, when Jack’s told the Livingstons that she’s going to sleep over at a friend’s house but hadn’t told them that it was her boyfriend she was spending the night with. “You’ve been so stressed, and it’s only the start of the season. What’s wrong?” He trails his fingers through the ends of her hair that are spread out on the pillowcase, watching Jack’s face as she looks away from him.

In some ways, it’s now or never. Jack has always known that she’d have to tell other people at some point, that it wasn’t something she could do in secret. Still, it’s new and it’s big and it scares her, a little, that she might not get to have the one thing that she wants.

She allows him to draw her a little closer as his arms pull her in. “I need to be better,” she whispers, because that’s really the start of it. The finish, too, when it comes down to the wire. If she’s better, she might not have to stress as much, might not be as worried. Even as she thinks it, though, she knows that she’s wrong. She’s always going to be worried and there’s nothing she can do to change it short of going back in time and being born a boy.

“You’re the best one on the team. Jesus, you’re kidding me, right? I love watching you on the ice; it’s some of the best hockey I’ve ever seen,” Kent tells her, part reassurance and part confession.

She twists towards him finally, rolling her body into his until her face is buried in the juncture between his neck and shoulder. How does she say that he’s said the best thing that he could have? “I want to tell you something, but you can’t laugh,” she finally says, knowing that the words are mumbled into his sweatshirt but hoping he’ll hear her anyway.

Spinning a finger through her hair, he wraps a tendril of it around his finger and tugs ever so slightly. “Can I laugh if it’s funny?” he asks, and she can hear the grin through his voice.

Jack moves so that her mouth isn’t pressing directly into his sweatshirt and narrows her eyes at him even though he can’t see it. “It’s not funny, so no. You can’t laugh.”

A beat passes, and then Kent combs his fingers through her hair at the edge of her scalp where he’s learned she likes it best. “Then I won’t laugh. What’s up?” he asks, and Jack wouldn’t typically characterize Kent as something close to gentle, but he’s incredibly so in this moment as he strokes her head and gives her the time that she needs.

It’s best to rip painful things off like a band aid, so she inhales quickly and lets it all out in one breath, “I want to be in the NHL. I want to be the first girl in the NHL.”

A silence follows, loud and almost impenetrable, but Kent keeps stroking her hair and doesn’t let up. “I think you can do it,” he says at last, and when she tilts her chin up to look at him he pulls her closer against him.

-x-

The season goes well and Jack celebrates with her teammates, sneaks Kent into her hotel room when they’re on roadies, and there’s starting to be a murmur in the crowd whenever people bring up that she’s a girl.

Of course she’s a girl, that’s nothing new, but for the first time people seem to be able to look past that.

She’s scoring more than anyone else on her team, studies plays at night after Kent falls asleep next to her, and she’s working harder than everyone else. She’s better than everyone else, it’s about time that she finally started getting some recognition.

Brigitte calls in a panic one day because she missed a deadline to send her transcript somewhere for early admission or something. She talks about NCAA women’s hockey programs, prospective paths and majors so that she’ll have something after hockey finishes. She asks where Jack is thinking about applying and Jack’s mouth runs dry when she thinks about it.

It’s the NHL or bust, and when she tells her parents that it’s like it finally gets through to them that she’s serious. Bob is smiling like he did when she told him she wanted to go to the NHL in the first place, when she said she’d play on the boys’ teams and it didn’t bother her.

Alicia rests her head in her hands. “You need a backup plan!” she tries to convince Jack, and maybe every rational part of Jack would agree with that under normal circumstances, but she’s heard rumors about the fact that she might go high in the draft and it’s not like she’s ever really wanted to go to college anyway.

The season has been a fantastic blur of Parson-Zimmermann no-look one-timers and beautiful shots that make Jack’s stats look even better than they already were, and Jack dreams of NHL jerseys and playing the best hockey she’s capable of. Bob is actually starting to like Kent, no small part because of how good he is on the ice, and if people would just stop asking her what she’s going to do in college everything would be better.

Her teachers ask her what schools she’s thinking about and the real answer is none but she just smiles and tells them she’s been considering her options and after they leave class she holds Kent’s hand tighter than normal.

-x-

A few guys on the team are the designated people to throw parties, guys with relaxed billet parents or ones who leave town often enough. There’s usually a place to go after a game, and Jack will go along with Kent and sit around with some of the guys on the team on their girlfriends. It always takes a few drinks for her to get comfortable, so she’s gotten used to doing a shot when she first gets in just to speed the process along.

“Poor me one, babe,” Kent requests from just outside the kitchen, so Jack pours another and they tip them together before throwing them back. She makes Kent some concoction that he swears tastes good, coconut rum and some sickly sweet soda, and then makes an extra strong rum and coke for herself.

These parties are always the same, but some part of Jack appreciates the routine of them. She waves at her teammates, leans into Kent’s side when they all sit in a circle and talk about the usual things: the game, things going on at school, whether Beaker has finally gotten together with that redhead or not.

“Jack, are you staying for another year after graduation?” asks the girl who Wilt’s just started dating, Jack can’t remember her name.

Shrugging, she offers a semblance of a smile and answers, “I’m not sure yet. Keeping my options open.” It might be a bitter smile, more of a grimace to someone who doesn’t know her, but Jack has learned that people don’t often see what they don’t want to.

Everyone cares about it, keeps asking if she’s staying until she ages out of Juniors or if she’s going to go play in college the first year she’s eligible. The rumors that are circulating about whether she has NHL potential only add fuel to the fire and make the frenzy that much greater. She stops doing quick interviews after games because that’s all that anyone wants to ask her about.

She copes, same as she always does. She takes her medicine and leans on Kent and tries to block everyone else out. She goes to the rink and practices shots and face-offs and does more drills than anyone thinks she needs. And when she goes out to parties, who cares if she drinks a little more? She’s still a straight A student, still lighting it up on the ice.

The party winds down in the usual way, an hour or so after midnight people start departing, grabbing their DD and heading home for the night, and Jack will have told the Livingstons she’s staying over a friend’s after so they won’t call her parents when she doesn’t come back. They don’t know the friend is just Kent, but sneaking out is something every teenager does.

Hell, if her mom found out, Alicia would probably cry from happiness.

They curl around each other, and Jack watches Kent through eyes that threaten to close. His blond hair, his easy smile, his all-American looks and attitude. She wonders if he was ugly in middle school, if puberty made him in the same way that it made her. She wonders how much of his attitude is in self-defense. Wonders if Kent’s ever had to be defensive about anything.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Kent whispers with his eyes still closed, and he tightens the arm he has wrapped around her waist, pulling her closer. “Did you enjoy the party?”

Jack relaxes into him, allows herself to stop putting off the idea of sleep. “As much as I ever do,” she agrees, because they’re never exactly fun, but Kent likes them and she likes Kent. He puts up with her neuroticisms, she can go to a party sometimes. She stills feels wide awake, even as the exhaustion from the day courses through her, tired from the game and the people and the party and the alcohol.

-x-

The one place that she and Kent fight is on the ice. Or, on the bench, more specifically. On the ice, they’re magic and it’s like they have some kind of mental connection. Jack knows what Kent’s capable of, the kind of winger that he is, so she knows how fast he can be down the ice to meet the puck and what kind of defensemen he can go through.

On the bench, they go through their shifts piece by piece, the missed shots and the passes that they only barely made, the new fancy dodges instead of just accomplishing it in the easiest way.

“You should have passed to me, I had an open line,” Kent snaps, spitting out his mouth guard and grabbing his water-bottle.

Jack takes out her own mouth guard and glares at him. “I still scored, don’t get so pissed. Maurice is better on his left side, so he’d have covered the puck if you had a shot,” she hisses.

When they’re like this, the rest of the team gives them a bit of space. Cam, their other line mate and Jack’s left winger, is the only one who will break things up, jabbing their shoulders and making them focus in on what’s happening on the ice now, not two minutes ago when they were still on it.

When the game is over, the team calls it their lover’s quarrels. “Did he leave the seat up again, Jack?” they’ll ask her before she heads off to change on her own. They make cruder remarks to Kent, Jack knows, because Kent’s told her about them, asking if he’s still going to get laid while she’s pissed and whether the sex will be better. They’ll joke that she’s on her period even though she’s like this every game and it’s not like she has her period continuously throughout the entire hockey season.

They’re hockey players. They don’t act any differently and wanting it to happen doesn’t mean it will. Jack gets changed on her own and takes her medicine and washes it down with a Gatorade.

By the time that she’s meeting them outside the tunnel, Kent’s hair is damp from the shower and he grins at her lazily as though she actually looks good after a game instead of red and splotchy in her face with her hair only just detangled. “Come on, we’re going to Wilt’s tonight,” he tells her, and Jack just nods.

Behind them, as Kent puts his arm around her waist, someone shouts, “Get it, Parser!” Kent turns around and laughs a little, jokingly moving his hand to get a grip on her ass, and Jack thinks about brushing him off and just going home, about calling Brigitte and restarting their tradition of Skype sessions after games. She fakes a laugh, though, and goes along with it.

-x-

Hockey girls can’t be hysterical. They can’t shout, they can’t scream. The only place that Jack can get away with that is on the ice, and only with Kent. She knows she’s good, but she can’t act like it. There is such a distinct line for her to walk. Ice queen on one side, the frigid bitch who takes everything too seriously, it’s a wonder that she even got a boyfriend, the sex probably isn’t any good, she’s so unemotional. Typical girl on the other side, cries when things don’t go her way, can’t take anything seriously, doesn’t think rationally about anything.

Jack has always walked the line, but it seems to get narrower every year. The bounds on her behavior are so limited, and now that some NHL scouts are starting to get interested, Jack barely even has any room to move.

Kent, as much as she hates to say it, is part of the problem.

In interviews, Jack gets asked about Kent as much as she gets asked about herself. In a way that she’d never anticipated, the media starts attributing her success to him. They never talked about keeping their relationship a secret, but now Jack wonders if they should, because they ask her about whether fighting with her boyfriend affects her more on the than fighting with her other teammates.

They ask about dates, they ask how much better she plays with Kent than with her other teammates, they ask so many questions about their relationship instead of just asking about hockey. There are interviews where Jack has readied herself to be asked what base they’ve reached.

“I thought this would happen when you started dating a teammate,” her father tells her when she’s been complaining during a call to home. His voice is steady but sad, and Jack wants to ask why he didn’t warn her, why he never mentioned exactly why he thought it wasn’t a good idea to date a teammate aside from the obvious.

Jack doesn’t know what to say, but they stay on the phone a few minutes longer. When they hang up, she thinks about maybe calling Brigitte, or maybe calling Kent, or even her mother. In the end, though, she doesn’t do anything, just goes out for a run, giving David a wave as she passes through the kitchen.

-x-

Playoffs mean that everyone’s blood pressure is running high, and Jack stays later and later after practice and wakes up more and more exhausted. Kent keeps telling her to get some sleep, but she hasn’t been getting the shots on goal that she needs, not to mention she’s not as fast as she could be on the power play. More sprints, more shots on goal, and her coaches finally tell her to cool it because she needs to be fresh for the game.

Scouts are coming to the playoffs, obviously, but scouts who are mentioning Jack Zimmermann with a hint of reverence, who talk about her contributions to the game as though she could make history. People mention ‘first female NHL player’ and Jack feels so big that she could win entire games by herself.

“You’re going to make history.” Kent talks about it as though it’s inevitable, as though it’s obvious, as though it’s her birthright, but Jack knows it’s so much more than that.

She works harder than anyone. She’s a demon on the ice, the announcers can barely keep up with where she’s putting the puck as they’re trying to broadcast the game. Her training routine would kill some of her teammates, and Kent can barely keep up with her if they’re dong sprints or drills.

She’s better than them, better than all of them, and Jack lies awake at night with the worry that she still won’t be good enough.

-x-

They win, they win, they fucking win. Memorial Cup, and Kent kisses her on the ice while cameras flash around them. Jack is too hyped to care about PDA, all she can think about is that they won. It’s just a stepping stone, but it might just be her last one. She’s been working at this for nearly eighteen years, and she’ll finally get to know.

NHL, NHL, NHL, Jack chants in her mind as she goes back to her changing room. It’s a mantra that she’s forcing into existence. Every point she put up, every bit of ice time, every early morning workout where she had to stop herself from throwing up she was pushing herself so hard. It’s all her, because of her, and she does interviews with journalists who keep asking about Kent but for the first time she doesn’t care.

One of them tells her that her name has even gotten tossed around for the first pick. “What do you think of that, Jack?” he asks, smiling at her.

“I think the only news I’d like better is actually being drafted first,” Jack says, and the reporters scribble on notepads furiously. She can’t help it, she’s riding so high on the win and the thought of going further that she stops and giggles at the thought.

First female in the NHL is one thing, but going first is a different story entirely. A fairy tale, almost, not that she wouldn’t deserve it. The idea of a first draft pick makes her feel like she’s floating.

A few of the reporters stop writing, but most just glance up. They all pause for a few seconds, and then they thank her for her time and leave. She’s so glad to be rid of them that she doesn’t bother to watch them go before she picks up her iPod to blast whatever some was playing last, some rock group that Kent listens to in the car. She pulls her jersey off and turns the volume up loud enough that she doesn’t hear the camera go off.

-x-

The articles are… Embarrassing, Jack guesses the word is. The articles talk about Kent kissing her on the ice after the buzzer sounded and when they trophy was brought up, about the fact that she giggled during her media time. They make all of her answers out to be jokes, or they say that she’s not taking it seriously enough. One even says that she “supported her boyfriend throughout the game”, as though she was cheering for Kent in the stands instead of beside him on the ice.

None of them mention that she might be the first girl in the NHL.

It makes her blood run cold, and Jack reads and rereads anything she can find about it. There’s a YouTube clip of her with the last reporter she talked to, her laughing after saying she’d like to be drafted first. “Jack Zimmermann is a Real Girl” is the title, so unimaginative that Jack can think of better ones without trying.

Kent puts off going back to New York, following her to Montreal in the wake of her bad press, and when they’re putting her bags in his car to go on the ride home they genuinely watch paparazzi snap several shots of them.

“Don’t say anything about it,” Jack says when Kent opens his mouth. She doesn’t know if he’s going to make it worse, but she doesn’t want to listen anyway. She watches him shut his mouth carefully, and it isn’t until their first stop for gas that they actually talk to each other. Even, then, they don’t really talk, Jack just buys him a bag of gummy worms when she goes inside to pay and she thrusts them at him without ceremony before they get back in the car.

He gives her one, the red and orange kind, her favorite, and he lets her choose the radio station for the next leg of the trip. It’s about as close to talking about it as they get nowadays, because Jack never wants to say anything and Kent doesn’t know how to act around her when she gets that way. They figure it out, though. They always do.

By the time they pull into Jack’s driveway, they’re back to normal. Kent is crooning Billy Joel at her and she’s throwing Chex Mix at him. “Watch it, I’m the driver,” he reminds her as he always does, and they hold hands. It’s not exactly idyllic, but Jack is feeling good, has even been coerced into singing a little bit with him. 

“Oh, hey, your mom’s out here… Your dad, too,” Kent says as they drive up, and he’s right. Jack’s parents are sitting on the bench outside, by the garden.

Jack tenses instinctively. She can’t see their faces because they’re both only facing each other, but this doesn’t feel right. Her dad looks over as the gate opens, and Jack feels herself freeze. He looks devastated, and she’s never seem him look like that before.

“Do you think they read your press?” Kent guesses, and that would make the most sense. Jack felt the same kind of devastation that’s shown on her father’s face when she read it. She shrugs, nods a little and braces herself before she steps out of the car.

It’s her mother who gets to her first, who completely ignores Kent for maybe the first time as she pulls Jack to her and looks into her face and touches her like she might break. “Oh, sweetheart,” Alicia breathes, bringing her in for a hug. “Oh, sweetheart, we’re so sorry. We’re not going to rest until we’ve made it right.”

Bob wraps his arms around both of them, and there aren’t many times where Jack feels small, exactly, but this is one of them, and she lets herself lean on them. “I already called our lawyer, don’t worry,” he tells her, and for the first time Jack notices that his face is streaked with tears.

“Why do we need a lawyer?” Jack whispers. She feels unsteady, like she doesn’t know quite what they’re talking about. The articles weren’t glowing, but Jack has had bad press before. And maybe this was worse than usual, but it wasn’t like they were calling her names or things like that.

Alicia sniffles, touching her cheek. “Why wouldn’t we need a lawyer? We’re going to fight this,” she says, her voice steadier than Bob’s but maybe more fragile, like once she breaks it will be worse.

Jack stays quiet, trying to piece it together, and Bob says, “Those pictures are unlawful.”

The world seems to wobble beneath her. Jack clutches at her father’s shoulder, feeling like a little girl again and having to depend on her father to protect her. “The pictures?” she asks, stomach sinking.

-x-

When Jack finally turns her phone on after she unearths it from her bag where she’d thrown it before getting in the car with Kent, it buzzes so loudly and for so long that she finally just turns it off again.

Kent sits next to her in her room and doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even try. He watches her as she goes to the windows and closes the blinds. When she sits down again, she sits with a bit of space between them before she whispers, “I thought the door was shut.”

She feels like she’s being watched, like even with the blinds closed and the outside world shut out, there’s still someone watching her through a lens somewhere. It feels like there’s something buzzing under her skin, like she could tear herself apart and it would still be there.

Her parents only barely let Kent stay. They didn’t say anything, but Jack watched their faces change when they looked at him. Even her mother, who had always liked Kent right from the beginning, looked at him as though she was looking at a stranger.

Jack is reminded of the summer that she went through puberty, when her body went into the season pudgy and overweight and came out looking like something photo-shopped. She remembers the photos that were published of her and Brigitte on the beach, Jack’s bikini no skimpier than any other girls but suddenly under scrutiny. Everyone had opinions, opinions about opinions, and Jack bought a one-piece to wear on the next vacation.

There are four pictures, five really but one of them so blurry that it’s impossible to make out anything other than the colors. One of her in her pads but no jersey, one of her in her sports bra once the pads have been removed, one of her bare ass as she’s bent over grabbing something on the bench, and one of her fully naked, reaching up with one hand to tie her hair back.

Kent tells her not to look at them, but she does, because even though they’ve been taken down on the original site, it’s not like everyone who looked at them didn’t download them to their own hard drive and upload them somewhere else. It looks like her, and Jack remembers in undressing in that order but it doesn’t feel like her. 

Surely, this has to be happening to some other girl, though Jack wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It feels impossible, a weight dragging her down, and Jack curls inward on herself and slams her laptop shut.

-x-

Alicia uses words like “invasion of privacy” (which Jack vehemently agrees with) and “pornography of a minor” (which Jack is uncomfortable to realize is technically true). Bob doesn’t talk about that, leaving his wife to handle the lawyers despite how he sounded when Jack first got home.

Bob, instead, asks her to show him her shot, talks about power and speed and things that were relevant before Jack’s life crumbled around her. He’s pretending that she still has a shot at the NHL, and as much as that hurts her to realize it’s not true, she thinks it must hurt him worse.

After offering several times to just stay until the draft, Kent goes home. He kisses her with the kind of gentleness that she’s only ever seen him display towards her, and Jack wishes that she didn’t need it but she does and she leans into his touch until he finally sighs and goes out the door.

He’ll be back the day before the draft, because Kent’s still going to be drafted, Kent doesn’t have nude pictures of himself leaked on the Internet and even if he did no one would care this much. It would be a little embarrassing, but Kent would laugh it off in an interview or two and it’d be done with. There really wouldn’t be anything to talk about.

“We need to know if you want to testify,” Alicia tells her one day, sitting her down at the big dining room table they usually use for dinners with big name guests but has recently become a display for all the papers for the case that Alicia and their lawyers are starting to make.

Jack doesn’t want to testify. She doesn’t know what there is to testify. Someone took photos of her without her consent, someone spread that to the Internet and let everyone and their mother see her naked. Jack has read grown men make comments about the size of her ass, how her tits aren’t that impressive but they’d fuck her anyway.

They always sound magnanimous about it, like they’re being generous. One of them even mentioned how overweight she was as a child, how she probably had self-esteem issues. How she’d probably be grateful.

“I’m not going to testify,” Jack snaps, gritting her teeth as she stares her mother down. She expects for Alicia to tell her that she should, that they’ll have a stronger case if she at least makes a statement, but Alicia just nods at her and accepts it.

Apparently they tracked down the guy who did this. Security footage from the rink, there was a camera outside Jack’s changing room that caught the guy who walked by after the reporters had left and noticed the door hadn’t shut all the way. They matched him with the IP address that uploaded the pictures originally, and Jack tries not to think about it even after her mother has reported it back to her.

-x-

She isn’t drafted. She goes to the draft, because she gets off on being publically humiliated apparently and because her dad says they should go. He’s ignoring the reality of the situation, and so Jack goes. She sits next to Kent and smiles at his parents while they look at her in pity, and when Kent gets called up as the first draft pick for the Las Vegas Aces, Jack claps for him and smiles widely for the cameras that are no doubt trained on her.

It’s easier to smile than it would be normally, probably because she’s been increasing the dosage of her medication. It’s the only way that she feels normal anymore.

Kent eventually makes it back to them after interview and interview, and he’s wearing a black and white jersey that Jack wants to claw out of his hands because she fucking earned that.

It’s not like Kent didn’t earn it, but he didn’t earn it in the way that Jack did. People never assumed that his gender was a white flag of surrender, that of course he wasn’t a real hockey player.

They draft everyone. Jack’s name isn’t called, and she reads an article where a scouting agent from one of the teams was interviewed and asked about Jack Zimmermann. He’d apparently said, “Yeah, there were a lot of rumors around Jack Zimmermann this year, especially in the post-season. Well, I can tell you that we love watching her play. We just feel like she needs to focus a bit more on the game. Maybe we’ll see her in a development camp soon, though, who knows?”

Jack needs to focus on the game. Up until the end of the playoffs, where she led her team in goals, she was focused on the game. One hundred percent focused on the game, everything else came second to it. But now there are shots of her bare ass on the Internet and middle aged men who weren’t able to adapt to how the game evolved well enough to keep playing are suddenly convinced she doesn’t have what it takes.

Kent holds her hand under the table during the rest of the draft, and Jack lets him as she thinks about other things, and when they walk out of the building it’s as though they’re shielding each other from the media.

Her parents are having the Parsons over for dinner that night, the dining room table cleared and Alicia’s work set back into her own office for the time being. Jack sits with Kent on the back porch, watching him lean over the railing and then push himself back to balance.

“Are you happy for me?” he asks finally, and it really is a loaded question.

She thinks it over, because more emotions are secondary at this point. Jack is focused on being whoever people want her to be, on being whatever people want her to be. Her own thoughts and actions are unfamiliar, and when she finally looks at him he isn’t looking back at her. “Yes, Kent, I’m happy for you,” she says finally, and he stares at her blankly.

“Well, you don’t sound like it,” he responds, and Jack doesn’t even know what the hell that’s supposed to mean.

It’s not like they haven’t fought before, because all of their teammates heard them argue on the bench, but this isn’t about passing lanes and who she should have passed it to from the faceoff or whether or not she should have even passed it in the first place. It’s new and Jack’s hurting and Kent must be, too, for the fact that was willing to start this in the first place. They start small, snapping at each other for smaller things, building, knowingly letting it snowball until Jack’s just happy they’re outside and their parents are on the other side of the house.

“And what the hell was with that crack you made during your interviews today? You said I was doing great things for women’s hockey, Kent. Newsflash, we were on the same team. I’ve never even played women’s hockey,” Jack snaps, feeling like she’s right on the edge after everything.

She needs him to support her right now. She went to the NHL draft and watched him get what she worked her entire life for, and she clapped and smiled for him. He doesn’t get to say that she’s not happy for him, that she isn’t supportive.

A scout said maybe she’d be involved in a development camp as though her name hasn’t been completely struck from the record. No one is ever going to take her seriously again, all because of nude photos that she didn’t even know were being taken. It’s all over, everything’s over, and she realizes that when Kent is screaming back at her, something about how doesn’t she realize that he’s stayed with her through all of this.

“All those times you were so uptight, I didn’t say anything! When you wanted to stay late at the rink and practice shots when I could have been out having fun with the guys, where do you think I was? I was with you, I’ve always been with you. And I know this sucks, but can’t you be happy for me?” he demands, and Jack’s blood boils for the first time since it went cold when she looked at those photos.

“You don’t get to be congratulated for doing something for me that I didn’t even ask you to do!” she screams, finally letting loose. “And you don’t become a good guy just because you weren’t an asshole! All those fucking interviews where you talked about me as your girlfriend instead of your teammate even though no one should have cared about the difference! My life is ruined and you want me to smile because you got something that I deserved?”

Kent stills, fury flickering on his face so obviously that, for just a moment, Jack wants him to hit her. She knows he won’t, she knows he’d never, but he needs to react to something instead of just processing it and that’s when he finally speaks, his anger obvious in his low voice, “I fucking deserved it, too. Do you know what it feels like to live in your girlfriend’s shadow when everyone else says that she’s not even supposed to be in the sport? You’ve always been good enough, Jack, and I never thought you weren’t, but there were times where I didn’t want you to be.”

She seethes for a moment, but his quiet anger is catching, and Jack takes control of herself. She’s not hysterical. This isn’t who she is, this isn’t who she’s going to be. Jack forces herself to breathe for a moment, and then she says, “Well, congratulations. You’re not living in your girlfriend’s shadow anymore.”

He looks at her almost blankly, and his expression changes as he takes the words in and what they might mean. “I didn’t win because I was better than you, and you know it. I won because some creep snuck into your changing room and took pictures of you.”

Yes, because she really needed to be reminded of that; she’d almost forgotten. Jack shakes her head. “I didn’t mean you’re not in your girlfriend’s shadow anymore because you finally proved yourself. I mean that I’m not your girlfriend anymore.” She holds her breath for a second, because it hurts to say it, more than she expected it would. Her lip wobbles and Kent looks at her in disbelief for a moment before nodding in defeat.

“Fine, if that’s how you want it,” he says, and Jack doesn’t know if that’s what she wants at all, just that it’s what she asked for.

-x-

Jack takes a pill before they all have dinner, and on second thought she takes two. During dinner, they haven’t told their parents but things are still awkward anyway, Jack’s parents having extended the invitation before they realized their daughter wouldn’t be drafted.

In some ways, it looks like her father still hasn’t realized it. Bob can barely look at her, and Jack doesn’t really want to look at him, doesn’t want his disappointment to remind her of her own.

They have wine at dinner, and despite the fact that she’s not yet eighteen, it’s only about a month to her birthday and her parents have never been strict, exactly, on alcohol consumption. Jack has a glass to start with and is on her fourth by dessert, and no one says anything about how much she’s drinking or how she and Kent haven’t said a word to each other since they walked in.

Jack drinks a fifth glass with the cake and then a sixth, and for the first time she doesn’t care about the cake and how many calories it is or whether or not she can fit it in her meal plan. She doesn’t really have a meal plan anyway, because she’s not in the NHL and she’s not on Oceanic anymore, and she didn’t even apply to any NCAA schools, and her life is pretty much over. She has another slice of cake and another glass of wine, and she’s sufficiently drunk that her mom has to help her up to her room.

“I want you to see a therapist,” Alicia says as Jack clumsily curls around her comforter, clothes still on.

“I broke up with Kent,” Jack tells Alicia, because she’s already a disappointment to her father in the one thing he cared about, she might as well let her mom know there’s a club now. She wants to cry, or maybe to sleep, but she doesn’t know how tired she is.

Alicia pats Jack’s cheek, staring at her blankly. “We’ll talk about everything in the morning. I’m putting some painkillers on your nightstand for when you wake up.” She leaves, then, leaves Jack alone on her bed with pills next to her and too much wine in her stomach.

She’s sad and she’s lonely and she’s drunk, and she’d like to be sleeping but it’s eluding her, so Jack only wastes about fifteen minutes before she stumbles out of bed and over to the bag in her closet that has a bottle of vodka and a bottle of champagne. She and Kent had picked them up, planned to drink them after they were drafted, because that was when they thought she’d still be drafted, because that was before some asshole ruined her life.

The champagne is cheap, a screw top instead of a cork, and she’d teased Kent about it but he’d said it’d taste like victory anyway. He was wrong, Jack thinks as she takes her first swig. It’s tart and weird, the first cheap champagne she’s ever had in her life, and the bubbles sit strangely in her stomach. She drinks it anyway, wondering whether the vodka might be better.

There’s nothing to mix it with, but she starts in on the vodka anyway just to wash the taste of the champagne away. She’s more used to cheap vodka from parties, taking shots with Kent in the kitchen and then curling into him the rest of the night. She always fucks everything up, like some kind of magician that makes the good things disappear. It feels like Jack turned to an audience and said, “watch this” before making Kent go away. She can never just let things be, apparently.

Where does she go from here? A hockey player with no hockey to play, a girl who doesn’t know what to do.

Maybe she’ll be like her mother and spend her days on charity boards, lunching with other women who have too much time on their hands. The thought of it makes Jack feel crazy, because she’s never wanted that, she’s never been that kind of person. She tries to chase the strange emptiness of her new life away with more of the vodka, but it hits the back of her throat wrong and she coughs a little of it up before managing to swallow.

Maybe without a meal plan and a training regimen, Jack will gain all the weight back. She’ll be the fat girl again, the way she used to be, and all those guys on the Internet who said they’d fuck her despite her small tits would call her more names that would make her feel the need to peel her skin off.

She’s never been made for consumption, and her body doesn’t belong to anyone. Even after puberty, Jack never really learned to like her body. It was good at hockey, at what she needed from it, so she respected it, but there was never any sense of attachment, no sense of love or connection with it. Maybe she was glad for a few days that people wouldn’t call her fat, but then she looked at a magazine and found out what they were calling her instead.

If she did become the first female NHL player, she never would have had a life away from the spotlight, and Jack doesn’t like media attention but she was willing to tolerate it to play the best hockey that she could. So she’s always been aware of cameras, always made sure to smile just enough, always kept her image as clean as she could.

One mistake, one lousy fucking mistake.

She twists and finds her pills, counts out two or three. Three, that seems right, but her heart is pounding so maybe she needs more. She washes them down with vodka and doesn’t even cough at the burn.

-x-

It isn’t until she’s started to throw up that she realizes what she might have done. She shakes, still clutching the toilet until she can move out of the bathroom and grab her phone. The numbers are blurry, but Jack forces herself to stare at them until they shift into place and she can dial with unsteady fingers.

Bile rises in her throat, and she practically throws herself into the bathroom, vomiting before she even makes it to the toilet. Tears sting at her eyes and she heaves herself up into a kneeling position, trying to hold her hair back as the voice through the tinny speakers in her phone asks, “911, what’s your emergency?”

-x-

There’s someone watching her. It the first thing that Jack’s aware of, and she twists slightly to see who it is as someone rests a hand on her shoulder and holds a glass of water in her line of sight. “Don’t try to talk right now,” she’s told, and as she thinks about it she realizes how raw her throat feels.

She accepts the water and looks up at the woman, who is smiling in a way that is too gentle. “Hi, Jack, I’m Emma, and I’m one of the nurses serving you at Montreal General Hospital. Are you feeling alright? You can just nod.”

Jack takes a drink and watches her carefully. She nods after a moment, because while her body certainly doesn’t feel 100%, it’s been worse before. She’s healed from worse and she’ll do it again. She in the hospital, because… She remembers calling 911. Or she remembers getting her cell phone to do that. Or maybe she just remembers thinking that she should.

Emma smiles that same smile, too gentle but a bit more encouraging, and she asks Jack a few more yes or no questions, ending with, “Your parents are outside, do you want me to bring them in?”

The honest answer is no, but Jack feels sick at the thought of her parents having to wait through the night after emergency services came in last night and said they’d received a call. She nods and drinks some more of the water, watching as Emma walks out and listening to her sensible nurses’ shoes walk down the hallway. She feels weighted down in the small hospital bedframe, like the thin blanket that’s resting over her weighs twenty pounds and is sinking into her chest.

She hears her parents before she can see them, her father’s heavy footsteps, the time between them signaling his long stride, accompanied by her mother’s shorter, quicker staccato footfalls. They rush through the door, Alicia slipping in as Bob continues to pull it open, and Jack really hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to look at them.

“Sweetheart,” Alicia whispers, moving closer and reaching out to touch Jack’s wrist where it’s lying on the bed, a laminated strip containing her information wrapped around it. “Jack, sweetheart, oh my God.”

Bob rests one hand on Alicia’s shoulder and moves the other to the side of Jack’s face. “Thank God,” he breathes, and every line on his face is formed from relief. Jack thinks, for the first time, that her father actually looks his age. 

They surround her, the intensity of their joy only reminding her of how badly she must have scared them, how badly she must have hurt them. It all piles onto her, the things that she has done and caused, the things that have been done to her, that have been taken away from her, and she chokes on the emotion. For the first time in years, Jack lets herself curl into her parents and cry.

-x-

Her parents tell her that Kent is still in the city, that he wants to see her, that they had to ask him to leave to go get some rest.

Neither of them look particularly surprised when she says that she doesn’t want to see him. It is already so hard to lie in a hospital bed and tolerate how gentle they all are with her when they’ve never been gentle before. Kent is the only one who was ever gentle with her before, and suddenly she hates that he saw how she needed that, she hates that he understood how weak she was.

They relay messages, they tell her that Kent has shown up at the hospital and is asking for her, that he just wants to know that she’s okay. Bob sits him down and tells him that Jack is stable and doesn’t want to see him, and Alicia tells Jack when Kent flies back to New York for the rest of the off season.

Her parents talk about maybe going to their house in Nova Scotia along the coast, how that might be nice, how a change of pace might suit them. They always use it as a plural, as though they all need help instead of just Jack, the one who landed herself in the hospital in the first place. She doesn’t really say much when they make plans, because it’s not as though she has any plans of her own that they could interfere with.

She meets with medical professionals who look at her sternly from over their glasses as they explain alcohol poisoning and prescription drug abuse. When she tells them how often she was taking her pills, the psychiatrist across from her rubs the bridge of his nose before speaking to her as though she’s a very stupid child. Part of her wants to be offended, but maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s just what she is and it’s about time they she got used it.

Rehab is the decision, because Jack doesn’t bite her tongue. She mentions the parties and the drinking and taking shots when they got through the door and taking her meds after games on the way over. They tell her she’ll have therapy and she can talk about other things, and none of them mention explicitly the fact that a man snuck into the room where she was changing and took pictures of her without her knowledge. Rehab, though, they say it might be the solution.

Rehab doesn’t sound right, but it’s not like Jack gets a choice in this, really.

Besides, it gives her something to do for a couple of months.

-x-

Brigitte comes to visit the morning before Jack leaves for rehab. Brigitte runs in, blonde braid flying out behind her, throwing herself into Jack’s arms without so much as a word. “You’re so stupid,” she says, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed and hovering close, no longer touching but hesitant to move away as though Jack might disappear.

It’s the first time someone’s been honest to her since those pictures, Jack thinks, and she’s so grateful for it that she reaches up and wraps her arms around Brigitte’s neck. “I didn’t mean to,” she whispers, because everyone keeps treating her like she did this on purpose but Jack wouldn’t, can’t believe that people think she would.

“Of course not. I meant you’re stupid because you never even talked with me after those pictures came out. I kept calling and sending you texts and you never even answered.” Brigitte frowns, looking critically at her. She’s straight to the point as she always is, and Jack has missed this, missed her. “I know you didn’t want to talk about it, but we didn’t have to. We could have had a girl’s night and I’d paint your nails and try to teach you how to do a four-strand braid again.” She’s smiling now, but it’s wobbly, and then she leans forward, putting more of her weight on Jack, pulling her in tighter. “Oh, Jackie. I hate that he did that to you.”

Brigitte is the only person in the world who Jack allows to call her Jackie, the childhood nickname that she gave up almost immediately after meeting Brigitte. It’s nice to hear, familiar in a way that makes her miss the other pieces of her that have been left behind.

It reminds her of sleepovers with Amelie and Nicole, relics of a life she doesn’t have anymore because she was uncompromising on the fact that her life had to be about hockey instead of just involving hockey. Jack sinks into her touch, pushes her face against Brigitte’s neck and listens to her make quiet, shushing noises. In a month, Brigitte will be at the University of Wisconsin for their women’s hockey program, and Jack will be in a rehab program.

Brigitte is going to major in Biochemistry, because she’s beautiful and smart and knows what she wants from life, and Jack is going to flounder around in Montreal until she can finally figure out a plan. Maybe Alicia was right after all, that she did need a school to serve as a backup.

“I’m going to write, you know. Or call, maybe, but your parents said you wouldn’t have a private phone. Plus, writing letters is a skill I don’t have, so might as well start developing it. It’ll be like leaving you a really long voicemail and waiting a week for you to leave me a voicemail to response,” Brigitte reasons, and that’s not what it’s going to be like at all but for a moment Jack is hopeful.

Jack tries to smile, pictures Brigitte talking with her parents about it. They’ve always liked Brigitte, Bob because she played hockey and Alicia because she was another indicator that Jack was normal and could make friends.

She sniffles, but’s closer to a giggle, and she pulls Brigitte even closer though there’s not much room between them. “We’ll need the privacy. How else am I supposed to tell you all of my secrets?” She swallows the lump in her throat and thinks of Brigitte in their old team jerseys, tries to remember what it felt like to not be alone in a locker room, to have a comrade on the ice. “You’re going to play so well. You’re going to love it.”

Brigitte gives a smile of her own, touching Jack’s face and nodding. “Maybe you’ll join me in a season,” she hedges, and Jack thinks about what it would be like, a locker room full of girls, not having to lower your voice to ask for a tampon or hide them discreetly in the side pocket of the game bag. It seems almost foreign.

“Maybe I will,” Jack agrees, but her heart isn’t in it.

-x-

Rehab is starched white sheets and a light gray comforter in a room with walls painted a mellow blue. The nurses and doctors smile at her, the therapist smiles at her, and she exchanges glances with the other inpatients as though they’re trying to figure out whether everyone is for real or not. When her parents visit, they squeeze onto the loveseat and Jack is forced to watch her father break into boy sized pieces every time she says something about her childhood.

“Do you think you felt pressured, Jack?” Dr. Williams asks, his thinning hair all the more obvious from how the sun hits his scalp. “Pressured to do well in that kind of environment, despite how unnatural of a fit it was?”

They keep trying to put it on her father, trying to blame him for everything, and maybe Jack does have some sort of Daddy issues where she’s always wanted him to be proud of her, but she likes hockey on its own merit. “I wanted to be better because I love the sport,” she snaps, curling her fingers into the fraying afghan that she’s gathered around her.

Bob is shaky when the questions are addressed to him, always glancing between Jack and Alicia as though one of them will say he remembers it all wrong. “Of course I wanted her to do well. She’s the best, and I wanted the best for her,” he says, and Jack hates watching him be this unsure, but at the same time she doesn’t know that it was the best for her, looking back.

Those sessions are hard. They’re harder than her individual sessions where Dr. Williams wants to talk about hockey, wants to talk about how it might have been a trigger for her, wants to talk about why she started taking her medication before the games in addition to in the morning. Still, though, nothing compares to the sessions where he wants to talk about the photographs and how she feels about them and if she saw them and what she thinks.

It is hard to describe the fact that Jack would prefer to skin herself alive than live with the knowledge that people have seen her this way.

Dr. Williams wants to talk about sexuality, about sexual relationships, about Kent and how that broke down. Jack practically locks her jaw as they go through the sessions, she says so little. The pictures tie into sexuality which tie into Kent who ties into hockey which ties back into the pictures. It’s a loop and she’s sick of it, she wants out and doesn’t know how to get there.

All she knows is that the last thing she needs is a balding man trying to talk to her about whether she feels that blowjobs are potentially subservient actions or not.

-x-

When she gets home, she finds that her parents have remodeled her bathroom and redone the carpet in her bedroom. Jack blinks at the new tile, trendy with tiny rectangles that don’t sit in any clear pattern. Alicia doesn’t say why they did the remodel, and Jack doesn’t ask, but she wonders what kind of impression it makes to find your daughter passed out on the floor.

Alicia is on new charity boards and doesn’t really bring it up, Jack only finds out through the invitations that come in mail. She feels out of place. Like she doesn’t quiet belong here, like it’s only a stepping stone on her way to find something else.

Her parents don’t know how to talk to her, which maybe isn’t new and they should have noticed it before. The only thing Jack ever talked about Bob with was hockey, and the only things she and Alicia really had going was Kent. Those are both gone, now, and now they have the stinging memory of therapy sessions to start them on a new relationship that isn’t really build on anything at all. When they go to the trouble of eating a meal together, they sit in complete silence.

It feels like maybe she really did die, and now she’s just haunting the house.

The lawyers are gearing up to go into trial, and Jack closes her ears whenever the subject is brought up. She doesn’t want to sit in a courtroom and listen to these arguments, she doesn’t want to look at the man who did this, she doesn’t want to go on the stand and make a statement of her own. Alicia only asks once before taking Jack’s answer at face value and not bothering her about it again.

A month passes, where Jack works out but only out of routine, not with any of the fervor she had before. There’s nothing for her in this house. She feels itchy, like she needs to be doing more, like if she spends another month like this she’ll go crazy.

She reads some of the books from her old English class, the ones she didn’t read then, just looked up the summaries and wrote on that. Some of them are good enough that she goes through them quickly without even trying, and she looks up recommendations from there.

Her parents don’t question the boxes of books that start to show up. Alicia smiles when she tells Jack that another one has been delivered, like she’s relieved that Jack has at least found something else to do for the time being. It’s a placeholder, and maybe one that will stick around, but Jack knows she just needs to be distracted for a while.

As the trial nears, so does the media attention, and Jack is picking up some things at the grocery store for Alicia when she notices a woman staring at her openly. Jack blinks, tries to not react, but she has to sit in the car for fifteen minutes before she feels well enough to drive away. She’s known for a few weeks that she can’t really just stay in Montreal and not do anything, but this is what motivates her to come home and start packing her bags.

“Are we going on a vacation that no one told me about?” Bob asks from behind her, and for the first time Jack wonders if they’re going to let her do this. If they’re going to let their only daughter, fresh out of rehab and with the media interested in her every move thanks to a trial that Jack doesn’t even want to attend, just leave.

She swallows, adding a couple more books to her backpack. “I wanted to go to the Nova Scotia house,” she tells him.

Bob freezes and Jack watches him carefully, the way that he seems to sort through the information, how hesitant he seems. For a terrible moment, Jack wonders if he’s going to offer to come with her, but she’s almost certain that he’s going to stay for the trial. That’s a part of why she wants to leave, because she knows she’ll be alone. He’s wavering, though, wrestling with letting her go without him, so it’s probably time to throw in the trump card.

“There’s hockey school happening at the local rink. I already called in, they could use coaching volunteers. It’s a co-ed peewee league,” Jack announces, and she knows he’ll let her go.

She wants to be on the ice, but she doesn’t want people to watch her on the ice. And maybe she’ll never actually be able to get that kind of privacy, because hockey is the national pastime and it’s hard for the girl who was supposed to be the first female in the NHL to be inconspicuous, but at least she won’t be home. She’ll have something to do, somewhere to be, a responsibility. That’s more than she could ever have while she’s still here.

-x-

The Nova Scotia house is larger than she remembers, possibly because it’s the first time she’s been staying there alone. It echoes when she walks through it, so she’s taken to wearing socks so she doesn’t have to listen to the acoustic resonance. There’s a week before the league starts up, but she goes into the rink to meet the other coaches and walks around and shakes their hands. Mr. Michaels, the man who hired her, tells her to call him Ned and introduces her to everyone else.

He gives her a key to the rink for early morning practices, and Jack closes her hand around it and holds it as though it’s going to keep her sane.

It will. She hasn’t been on the ice in weeks, and she just needs to skate again.

She wakes up and goes for a run like she’s gotten used to, texts Brigitte and wonders about how she’s handling a life that Jack had never considered, wonders around the market and buys food for the day. Maybe she’ll learn how to cook since she’s on such an independence kick after all.

By the time that she’s meeting her team, she feels settled into her skin. She got in early enough to give herself a workout on the ice beforehand, and her time away is already evident. She’ll need hours and hours to get back to where she should be, more when she considers that it’s just going to be her and she won’t have a team to work with.

The kids are twelve and thirteen, twenty-three of them in total with five girls who trail after Jack like ducklings. They call her Coach Zimmermann, which is so startling that she immediately tells them to switch to Coach Z. It’s not much better, but it reminds her less of when her father was considering moving back to Pittsburgh after retirement and thought of maybe picking up coaching. It’ll do, though, and that’s what matters.

-x-

Kent calls. He’s in Las Vegas now, and he’s doing well. According to his stats, at least, not that Jack has actually talked to him since before she landed herself in the hospital.

She thinks about answering sometimes, but the thought sits her stomach and she can’t make herself actually do it. He never leaves a message anyway, so it’s probably not that important. He still calls, though, usually before a game, because she keeps up with his schedule as though she can’t help herself. Maybe it’s a part of his routine now, and she wonders if it’s just served to replace the quick kiss they used to share before heading out onto the ice, one after the other.

Sometimes, after later practices, she’ll check her phone to see the missed call notification and she’ll stare at it for a long while before dismissing it.

What do they have to talk about, anyway? A failed relationship that almost worked out, a hockey team they’re no longer on, all those nights that she watched Kent when she couldn’t sleep. She doesn’t want to argue and she doesn’t want to get back together, so silence is really the best option. It feels like silence follows her everywhere, like she’s distanced herself from the rest of the world so well that there’s a gap between them that’s grown insurmountable.

The kids are the easiest to connect to, especially the girls, because Jack remembers being their age and not understanding why people wanting her to stop playing with the boys. She watches them as they learn plays, and most of them play like the rest of the kids their age, but there are a few who are focused on the entire rink instead of just the puck, who can make plays happen with a sense of awareness that Jack doesn’t know if she had back then. She tells Brigitte about it, tries to remember if either of them were like that.

She talks with Brigitte and David calls her once, tells her what the guys who are still on the team that she knows are up to. David wasn’t drafted but he claims he isn’t bothered much by it. “I know I have a lot of areas to grow in,” he tells her, and it’s true enough even if Jack does know that he’s a good player.

Besides, he still has time, and not everyone is drafted as soon as they’re eligible. She talks with him for a short while, feels relaxed and vaguely normal at the end of the conversation, when he hasn’t brought up Kent or the NHL or the photos or the trial that’s ongoing.

Her parents call, trading off the duty as though they have a chore chart or something. It’s easiest to talk with Bob, to tell him about the drills she’s been running and talk about how the kids are doing. “They really… They really like the game,” she says.

“It’s an easy game to like,” he answers, and she feels like they’ve said something else.

She wants to tell her father that he did what he thought was best, that she wanted to play with the boys. Jack wants to say that the kids she coaches like the game the way she remembers liking it before she had to focus on winning, before a single goal drowned everything else out. She wants to like the game like that again, to deal with losing as though it won’t kill her.

-x-

When the trial ends, Alicia calls her to give her the verdict since she knows Jack won’t look it up otherwise. “He’ll be in jail for a long time, sweetheart,” she says carefully, sounding worn and tired. It’s been months, and Jack guesses that she hasn’t been sleeping well while she’s been trying to deal with this.

Jack knows so little about her mother before she was, in fact, a mother. She knows the names of movies she was in and the college she graduated from and that she got her start as a catalogue model, but Jack doesn’t know about how she broke into the industry, doesn’t know why she’s dealt with this trial the way that she has. She doesn’t want to, maybe, and that’s a hard thing to admit to herself but it’s easier than asking and getting the answer she’s afraid of.

The phone line goes quiet between them, and Jack thinks of the distance that sits between her and her parents, how the feet between them in therapy sessions felt like miles that stretched too far for the eye to see. They don’t need a ceasefire, but maybe an olive branch would be more applicable. “You and Dad should come visit me. The Tornadoes have a game on Saturday,” she says, holding her breath as soon as the words leave her mouth.

There’s a sound, something that Jack tries to identify but can’t before Alicia says, “We’d love that. We could get a hotel, or would you like us to stay with you while we’re there?”

This, too, is an olive branch, and Jack appreciates that they’re letting her have this space when it can’t be easy for them. It’s a different type of independence than they thought they’d be giving to her at this age, when she’d expected to move across the country or possibly to a different one entirely, when she thought she’d call them on road trips and go over game tape with her father more than anything else. She misses that dream, and she still lies awake at night, trying to think of how to get it back, but this is her life now and she’s growing used to it.

“You guys could stay with me. I’ll show you what I’ve done with the house,” Jack says, thinking of the area in the back that she tried to garden one day. She doesn’t know if the sprouts that are starting to show up are actually the plants she wanted or if she hasn’t been weeding it well enough, but maybe it will come along. She’s changed out some of the photos, and if her parents notice that she’s removed all of the team photos from Juniors, that’s just something she had to do.

It’s always been hard for her to connect with her mother, but maybe she should try. The closest they get is when Alicia visited Rimouski for games and asked Jack would ask her to do her game day eyeliner. It’s a tradition, solely on game days, and she does better at it now than she used to when she was thirteen, but she’s always amazed at how much steadier her mother’s hand is at it than her own.

“That sounds lovely, Jack,” Alicia says, and her voice is full of something that’s almost familiar to Jack but she hasn’t heard it in years.

-x-

Sometimes, when they’re a few people short, Jack will join one of the teams when she splits them for a scrimmage, and she’ll go as easy on them as she needs to, but it reminds her of first learning how to play on a team. She misses playing on a team, misses how Oceanic used to go to one of the diners nearby after some practices, how they’d pile into the booths and order enough food to last a group of non-hockey players for the whole day. She only started going after she started dating Kent, but she misses that sense of comradery.

She calls David and they talk about it, and she tells him about the young boy on her team who tried doing a spin to avoid a check and ended up skidding on the ice after he fell. “It looked like it hurt, but he just skated it off,” she comments. It’s not that notable, because it’s what all hockey players do, but Jack can’t stop thinking about it all the same.

“What are you doing next year?” David asks her when the conversation has almost been exhausted. It makes Jack wish she’d hung up earlier.

The truth is that she’s been trying not to think about it. Brigitte keeps pushing for the University of Wisconsin, invites Jack down to visit for breaks or games and swears that they’d have a blast. It’s the most tempting prospect, Jack will admit, if only because she wants to be on a team with Brigitte again.

Other options include staying to coach another year and moving back to Montreal to do nothing except maybe she’d train a little more.

She doesn’t know what she wants to do, but the dates on the emails that Brigitte sends her with admissions information are drawing closer and closer, and soon enough if Jack doesn’t make a choice one will be made for her. College is… Only a temporary solution. They all are, if she’s being honest, because she has to do something with her life, but college is something else. Not just hockey, but hockey and something else. College creates a life where hockey is something secondary, where Jack will balance practices with writing papers on the bus to away games, to using a reading light to stay up to finish sections of a textbook.

What would she even choose as her major? Hockey-related things come up first: physical therapy, sports management. Science isn’t her strong suit, and Jack doesn’t even know what sports management really means. Literature might be an option, but Jack doesn’t know that she likes to read that much.

Still, though, college might be the best way for her to keep playing. It would give her four years to train, and it would give the NHL four years to forget that they’ve all her naked.

She thinks about it and thinks about as the season passes by, and by the time that the dates in Brigitte’s emails have passed Jack still hasn’t made any kind of decision. If anything, she’s even further away from knowing what she wants to do.

-x-

She agrees to coach peewee again next year, and she moves home for the summer. Bob was talking about traveling, about going to see old friends of his, retired NHLers that Jack grew up calling Uncle and hasn’t seen in years. These are men who broke records, who babysat her, who watched her play and told her she was amazing, who thought it was cute when she wanted to be the first woman in the NHL.

They sent flowers to her hospital room and her room in the rehab center. Jack had never seen such huge displays, the vases barely able to hold the bulging mass together. The cards were all similar, gave her well wishes and said they hoped to see her on the ice again soon.

Packing her bags, Jack wonders what Kent is doing for the offseason. The Aces got the final wildcard slot going into the playoffs and only managed to victories before their season ended. He called her before every game, still didn’t leave a voicemail. She doesn’t think about picking up anymore, just lets him have this. She doesn’t know how their relationship devolved into this, but it seems like tracing the steps back would be like following a string, a portion of which is tied into an incomprehensible knot.

“Ready to see some of the guys again?” Bob asks her, and the answer is actually yes. Jack has jokingly been referring to the get together as a family reunion, because both of her parents are only children and hockey uncles are the only uncles that she even has.

-x-

It’s terrible. Jack races in the house as soon as they’re home, sprints up to her room and sits on the new carpet and tries to remember how the old one felt.

All anyone could do when they looked at her was say how sorry they were, how bad they felt, what a shame it all was. Bob and Alicia tried to steer the conversation to other areas, always, directing everyone’s attention to the fact that Jack’s peewee team had won their championship and she’d had a lot of fun with the kids.

If anything, that made it worse. The men who Jack grew up around would smile indulgently and ask her when she was thinking of having children, as though eighteen is a great time to give up on a dream. Jack smiled, though, choked through the same conversation again and again, and told people that she would be coaching again next year but she’d also be looking into getting back into her playing career.

They all nodded at her, smiling on the outside. Jack saw it in their eyes, though, how none of them believed her, how they all thought she’d played her last game and it was time for her to hang up her skates.

The only one who hadn’t been bad was Uncle Mario, who just looked sad. She wonders if he was thinking about his own daughters, who Jack hasn’t seen in years and years. She wonders if they’re still playing hockey, and if not she wonders why and when they stopped.

Still, though, their disbelief gives her the motivation that she needs to jump back in. It will be harder to make herself believable in a women’s league, because people will think of her a women’s hockey player not just a hockey player, but she’s used to training harder than everyone else, she’s used to pushing herself to be more than everyone else.

She starts scanning college programs, thinking about what team she’ll be best showcased on. There’s been interest, her parents told her, but they didn’t want to make her feel pressured so they never passed it along.

-x-

By the time she goes back to Nova Scotia, the small town feels tiny instead of cozy. Nothing has changed except now Jack has a desire to move forward. After her kids get off the rink and have all been picked up, Jack keeps her workout clothes on and goes out onto the ice, doing everything that she can to get back into shape.

She’s slower on the ice than she used to be, less used to chasing after the puck than she is to chasing after children who are significantly slower than it. Still, a start is a start, and Jack logs hours on the ice and makes good use of the machines in the small gym at home.

The school search is going slower. She’s been in talks with some of the coaches, trying to figure out where she’ll fit best, she’s been studying for the proper tests to take meanwhile.

Things are almost ready to slide into place when she tells Alicia about it, who pauses when she hears. “Well, how would you feel about coming to Samwell with me for a weekend? My reunion is coming up and it might be a good time to visit the campus if you’re interested. I know you said it wasn’t your top choice, but we could go by BU and see them as well,” she suggests.

It sounds like a good idea, but Jack thinks of a weekend spent practically alone with her mother and wonders just how fun it would be. They don’t really spend time alone together, always with some sort of buffer.

Olive branch, Jack reminds herself before agreeing.

-x-

The flight in is vaguely uncomfortable, both of them trying to figure out conversation topics before giving up. Jack goes back to her book and her mother consults the itinerary she’s been given for the weekend. Jack has set up meetings with the coaches during times where Alicia will be otherwise occupied, and she also has some private ice time reserved just to get a feel for the rink. It sounds stupid, but every piece of ice is different. If Jack is going to spend four years at a school, she wants it to have good ice.

She’ll go on the campus tour with her mom because Alicia wants to see what buildings are new, what’s been updated. “I can tell you where we used to use chalkboards instead of whiteboards,” Alicia jokes, smiling hesitantly.

“You’re going to annoy the tour guide the whole way and tell him how it used to be,” Jack says, trying to sound excited about it. 

It’s going to be an experience, but Jack wants to have this with her mom. Bob offered to come down with them, to meet with the coaches and talk about the program, but Jack just shook her head. “It’s going to be a girl’s weekend,” she explained, giving him an easy grin to relieve whatever guilt he felt.

So maybe she figured out in therapy that she’d like her dad to be a little less involved in her hockey. She doesn’t want him to be less involved in her life, though, it’s just that that’s a problem because so much of her life is hockey.

It’s good for this to just be her and Alicia. New, and a little awkward, but good. Almost two years later and Jack is still figuring how to navigate her relationship with her parents post-hospital, post-rehab.

They’ve booked a hotel on the edge of campus, near a pizza place that Alicia swears serves the greasiest pizza she’d ever eaten. “They were open twenty-four hours a day, and it was the best hangover cute you could find,” she explains, and Jack tries to picture her mother in her college years, already gathering some form of fame, wearing sunglasses indoors to shield herself from the lights as she orders two slices of pepperoni. Jack tries to picture her mother eating pizza in the first place.

It’s funny, in a way, walking her mother over to the auditorium that her class is giving a speech in. Alicia keeps checking in that Jack knows where to go to get to the rink, that she knows what hallway the coaches’ office is in. Jack lets her hand off a map and makes a promise to call if she gets lost before heading out. 

By the time she makes it to Faber, she’s five minutes late because she underestimated how large the quad would be. The campus feels warm and welcoming, and Jack likes Samwell so far but she still has other options to consider.

At least, she had other options to consider before she walks through the doors. It doesn’t feel like coming home, because home in Montreal seems almost foreign in a way that it never did before nowadays. It feels like walking into the house in Nova Scotia, like it’s a part of the family already but she’s making a mark of her own on it. It feels like the kind of building she wants to hold early morning practice in and skate laps again and again until she absolutely has to leave or she’ll be late to class.

She gets distracted, standing by the glass and looking in. The ice looks good, like no one’s touched it. It makes sense, it’s not really hockey season, but something about untouched ice gives her goosebumps in the best kind of way.

“Excuse me?” someone asks from behind her, and Jack turns, startled. A middle aged man smiles at her, adjusting his glasses. “Ms. Zimmermann, I’m Coach Hall. We were wondering you’d gotten lost.”

Embarrassed, Jack straightens and offers her hand. “I’m sorry, I was just… I was looking at the ice,” she offers.

Coach Hall doesn’t seem annoyed, only slightly bemused. He shakes her hand before looking out over it as well, a smile sliding over his features as he does. “We’re very excited to have you here for the day.”

Jack still feels like she did when she first entered the building, like something about it could belong to her. “I’m excited to be here,” she tells him, and it feels like one of the first truly honest things she’s said in weeks.

**Author's Note:**

> The "invasion of privacy" tag was included because someone takes nude photos of Jack without her awareness or consent.
> 
> I'm helpless-in-sleep on tumblr


End file.
